Author: GNOME Foundation

Sugar Learning Platform and GNOME Desktop Now Shipping on the One Laptop per Child XO-1.5

ASUNCIÓN, June 14, 2010 – Sugar Labs, the GNOME Free Desktop Project, and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) have announced an update to the software offered on the OLPC XO-1.5. The 1.5 million children already using Sugar on the original XO-1 can also benefit from the update, since Paraguay Educa has backported the software.

The Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through child-friendly Activities that encourage critical thinking. The GNOME free desktop is a hallmark of all major GNU/Linux distributions, suitable for older children and grownups. Switching between the two environments takes only a single click. With GNOME on the XO laptop, the door is opened to thousands of additional educational and productivity applications.

The XO-1.5 has the same industrial design as the original XO-1. Based on a VIA processor, it provides 2× the speed of the XO-1, 4× DRAM memory, and 4× FLASH memory. OLPC has announced the availability of a high-school edition of the XO-1.5, the XO-HS, with a newly designed keyboard, more comfortable for older students. The first deployment of the XO-HS is set to begin in Uruguay under the highly successful Plan Ceibal in September.

Children familiar with the XO-1 will naturally grow into the XO-1.5 with its expanded functionality. “One Laptop per Child promotes open-source software so that it can grow and adapt to the needs of the child. The Sugar platform on the XO is key to our educational mission because it gives students a unique and intuitive learning software environment,” said OLPC Association CEO Rodrigo Arboleda.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said, “We’re really excited to be working with Sugar and OLPC to provide desktop software to children of all ages. GNOME’s mission is to provide a free desktop accessible to everyone. Children from Uruguay to Ghana will be able to use their XOs to learn and to show their friends and families how to use Sugar and GNOME.”

Walter Bender, Executive Director of Sugar Labs, said “the fluidity of movement between the two desktops gives learners the ability to transition from a learning environment – Sugar – to a production and productivity environment – GNOME. They have the means of honing the creative skills acquired in an elementary education setting into entrepreneurial skills in a secondary education setting.”

“Sugar on a Stick” allows children who don’t have an XO laptop to benefit from this new software. Available for download from Sugar Labs in the new, v3 Mirabelle flavor, it can be loaded onto an ordinary USB thumbdrive and used to start a PC in Sugar without touching the hard disk. The XO laptops and Sugar on a Stick run Fedora GNU/Linux

About Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, nonprofit organization, is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Originally part of the One Laptop Per Child project, Sugar Labs coordinates volunteers around the world who are passionate about providing educational opportunities to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Sugar Labs is supported by donations and is seeking funding to accelerate development.

For more information, please visit http://www.sugarlabs.org/.

About GNOME

GNOME is a free-software project which develops a complete, accessible and easy-to-use desktop standard on all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions. Popular with large corporate deployments and millions of small-business and home users worldwide, it includes a development environment to create new applications. The nonprofit GNOME Foundation is composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies.

More information can be found at http://www.gnome.org/ and http://foundation.gnome.org/.

About One Laptop per Child

OLPC is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are inexpensive enough to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.

For more information, please visit http://www.laptop.org/.

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Collabora Joins the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board

UK software consultants to help in mission to create a free software computing platform.

May 5, 2010 — UK-based open source software consultancy Collabora is joining the GNOME Foundation advisory board today. A long time supporter of GNOME and member of the GNOME community, Collabora contributes directly to GNOME projects like Empathy, PiTiVi, Totem and Epiphany.

The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project — to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software. On the advisory board, Collabora will work with the GNOME Board of Directors to help set vision and direction for the GNOME Foundation.

“We are proud of the work we’ve done in the past on GNOME projects and are happy to join the advisory board and contribute to the GNOME Foundation as well,” said Robert McQueen, director and co-founder at Collabora Ltd. “We’re passionate about open source and we look forward to the chance to help shape the future direction of the GNOME project alongside the other advisory board participants.”

“As a member of the GNOME community and the employer of key GNOME contributors, we are delighted to welcome Collabora to our advisory board,” said Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. “They are already a key part of the GNOME community and their perspective on the advisory board will be of huge benefit to both the GNOME project and the other companies represented on the board.”

Collabora was a founding member of GNOME Mobile in 2007 and their technologies form key parts of the GNOME Mobile stack. In addition they work on many technologies that benefit the GNOME project like GStreamer, Telepathy, Farsight, D-Bus, X.Org and Webkit Gtk+. Their work is key in realising the GNOME vision of a free, accessible desktop and mobile platform for everyone.

“I’ve enjoyed working with Collabora since they joined the GNOME community, and they’ve made some significant contributions over the past few years, so it’s great to see them joining the GNOME Foundation too.” says Michael Meeks, Linux Desktop Architect at Novell, Inc. “Their frank insight and dynamism will be most welcome in the advisory board.”

GNOME technology forms a key part of mobile platforms such as Nokia’s Maemo, Intel’s Moblin and their merger to form the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo platform, launched at Mobile World Congress 2010. Companies like Collabora work with the GNOME community and the platform companies to deliver free and open source solutions. Members of the GNOME Advisory Board help the GNOME Foundation work with partner companies effectively and get the chance to collaborate with each other on their use of GNOME technologies.

About Collabora Ltd

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK with a network of developers worldwide, Collabora Ltd. is a software consultancy specializing in delivering the benefits of open source to the commercial world. Collabora combines years of open source software expertise with hard-won experience from working in the mobile and consumer electronics industries. They help clients effectively take open source technologies from the community to real-world consumers, re-using existing components to reduce time to market and focus on product differentiation.

For more information please visit www.collabora.co.uk.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

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GNOME Project Updates Free Desktop with 2.30 Release

BOSTON, Mass — March 31, 2010 — The GNOME Project is proud to announce GNOME 2.30, the latest stable release of the popular Free Software desktop environment and applications suite. GNOME 2.30 builds on previous GNOME releases and brings hundreds of improvements for users and developers, including enhancements for user management, Web browsing, support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features.

GNOME contributors have added improvements across the board for GNOME 2.30 in accessibility, productivity applications, Web browsing, instant messaging, and games. This release includes hundreds of new features, enhancements, and improvements over the GNOME 2.28 release from September 2009.

“I’m really pleased with all of the updates in GNOME 2.30,” said Stormy Peters, GNOME Executive Director. “I’m excited that I can automatically sync my Tomboy notes between my desktop and laptop computer, easily configure Facebook chat in Empathy instant messenger, and do more with PDFs in Evince. GNOME 2.30 provides everything I need for work and play.”

The GNOME Project thrives by consistently improving on previous releases while retaining compatibility and delivering a user-friendly desktop environment and applications twice a year. GNOME combines a commitment to Free Software with a focus on usability and working well with downstream projects to deliver a high-quality suite of free software.

“GNOME’s commitment to usability, quality and predictable delivery is a key contributor to Ubuntu’s success,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical. “GNOME sets the standard for a diverse and vibrant community that shares the goal of a Free desktop that is both familiar to users from any computing background, and also innovative. Congratulations to the project on this significant release.”

The 2.30 release contains significant user-visible improvements, adding numerous platform improvements for developers, and builds towards the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release with a preview of the revolutionary GNOME Shell. GNOME Shell, which will replace the existing GNOME Panel, changes the way users will interact with the desktop.

“I’d like to congratulate the GNOME project on a state of the art GNOME 2.30 desktop release,” said Andreas Jaeger, program manager of openSUSE for Novell. “I’m glad that we are able to include it in our next release and also have it available for easy installation on openSUSE 11.2. We’ll be providing packages via the openSUSE Build Service to allow users to easily test drive the upcoming GNOME 3.0 features like the GNOME Shell.”

GNOME 2.30 is immediately available via GNOME Live Media, and will soon be available from the many vendors and projects that support GNOME.

“The GNOME environment and platform have been a central part of Fedora’s releases since our earliest days. Over that time, GNOME has matured into a vital and healthy project that consistently combines simple, beautiful, user-friendly features and a robust platform for community-driven development,” said Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader. “It’s a point of great pride that Fedora community members including Red Hat’s Desktop engineering team have contributed significantly to GNOME. I’m excited that we’re already involved in planning for the next generation of desktop technologies, including GNOME, that will help us build the free software desktop of the future.”

GNOME is also committed to delivering a Free desktop for all users, and translations and Accessibility work is an important part of the GNOME 2.30 release. This release includes a number of improvements in GNOME’s Orca Screen Reader that improve performance and use on netbooks, and platform improvements to ready GNOME’s Accessibility interface for GNOME 3.0. The 2.30 release also delivers comprehensive support for more than 50 languages, and partial support for many others.

“I’m extremely excited with the number of different languages currently supported by GNOME,” said Og Maciel, Foresight Linux Community Manager. “If there is one single feat about GNOME 2.30 that I’m proud of is the great work done by the Asturian and Shavian translation teams! We now have more than 50 different languages with at least 80% of the user interface translated, which means that more people will be able to enjoy their favorite desktop environment in their native tongue!”

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

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GNOME Teams Take Top Rankings in Code for a Cause Competition

BOSTON, Mass — March 22, 2010 — GNOME Teams working on GNOME Caribou have taken top rankings in the Code for a Cause competition hosted by Project:Possibility. In the initial sprints on Feb. 27 and 28, GNOME’s team took 1st place at UCLA and 2nd place at USC. In the head-to-head competition on March 6, GNOME’s UCLA team placed 2nd and GNOME’s USC team placed 3rd. Teams now have the opportunity to present their projects at the 2010 CSUN Conference on Saturday, March 27.

SS12 is a programming competition run jointly by Project:Possibility and local Association of Computing Machinery chapters where teams of students compete to develop open source software for persons with disabilities over the course of a weekend.

On Feb 27-28, eighty-four students formed eight USC teams & six UCLA teams and coded throughout the entire the weekend. Coding began at 9am on Saturday, and ended at 5 p.m. on Sunday. The competition was fierce at the event, and some teams continued coding as late as 3 a.m. Sunday morning to work on their projects.

Students were selected for teams based on the project preferences they indicated at the beginning of the weekend. GNOME’s accessibility (a11y) team collaborated by recommending a number of potential project ideas. Two teams chose to add binary input capabilities to GNOME Caribou, and were guided throughout the weekend by GNOME programmer Ben Konrath remotely through IRC. Other GNOME accessibility developers including Willie Walker, team lead, dropped by during the competition to provide support in person.

GNOME Caribou provides text entry and computer control for users who do not use a keyboard. This allows access by those who only use a pointer device, such as head mice or eye trackers, and those who can only perform very simple gestures with primitive on-off switch devices. The code added by the students adds critical facilities for access with basic switch devices.

The students faced the added challenge of acquainting themselves with a code base they were unfamiliar with, and familiarizing themselves with the GNOME platform and Caribou software early on in the competition before they could even get to the coding. Fortunately, they were up to the challenge and impressed the judges with their presentations.

The weekend culminated in teams presenting their work to a panel of judges at each campus. Projects were evaluated based on their thorough documentation, completion of the task at hand, and addressing the challenge factor or difficulty of the project. The judges awarded the USC team second place overall out of eight teams, and the UCLA team first place overall out of six teams. Both teams were also recognized as top-3 teams at the Finals round the following weekend.

In addition to winning prizes and being recognized for their work over the weekend, students working on the GNOME projects also gained a positive experience developing code for an existing open source project.

“For me, SS12 was a great experience in designing and coding a feature from scratch in a short timeframe. It was a great project to work on, and we just sent our work up as a patch to be possibly included in the next release of the Caribou on-screen keyboard,” said Ben Walker, a member of the USC GNOME team. “I didn’t think I’d actually be contributing in a meaningful way to open source projects as only a Junior in college, but thanks to GNOME and Project:Possibility, I’ve had a fantastic time doing so.”

As a final accolade, the winning teams will have the opportunity to present their projects at the 25th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference (2010 CSUN Conference) on Saturday, March 27, where they will also meet the GNOME accessibility developers in person.

Project:Possibility is a nonprofit community organization that enables students to learn about accessibility and open source through competitive events where they develop open source accessibility software. For more information about Project:Possibility and the SS12, check out our website athttp://www.projectpossibility.org.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

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GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. to Co-Host Conferences in 2011

BOSTON, Mass — March 16, 2010 — Following the successful Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in 2009, the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. Boards have decided to co-locate their flagship conferences once again in 2011, and are taking bids to host the combined event. The Desktop Summit 2011 will be the largest free desktop event ever.

In July of 2009, the GNOME and KDE communities came together for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the first co-located KDE/GNOME event. It was a major success, and was a fantastic opportunity for the leaders of the free software desktop efforts to share talks, communicate on common issues, and attend combined social events. The attendees from both projects expressed great interest in repeating the event and merging the programmes to synchronize schedules and make the event an even greater opportunity for the KDE and GNOME teams to learn from each other and work together.

“The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was a great first event,” said Vincent Untz, GNOME Foundation Board Member. “We enjoyed working with our KDE friends at GCDS in 2009, and want to increase our cooperation in 2011. We plan to go beyond simple co-location this time, and actually plan a combined schedule in 2011 so that KDE and GNOME contributors have every opportunity to work with and learn from each other.”

The combined summit is also an opportunity for commercial sponsors of the GNOME and KDE projects to meet with the contributors from KDE and GNOME and to help foster faster collaboration and development of the free software desktop. Sponsors of the first Desktop Summit have expressed great interest in seeing both communities working together again.

The GNOME and KDE projects will hold independent events in 2010. GUADEC, the GNOME Project’s annual conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands on July 24 through July 30 of this year. KDE’s Akademy will be located in Tampere, Finland from July 3 to 10 this year. Both groups will likely hold smaller sprints through 2010 and early 2011 to prepare for the combined 2011 Desktop Summit.

“The KDE e.V. board felt that GCDS was a fantastic event, and we learned what works well and what can be improved when co-hosting an event with our GNOME friends,” said Cornelius Schumacher of the KDE e.V. “KDE and GNOME share a lot of goals for the free desktop, as well as technology, so we’re excited to make use of this experience and have an opportunity to co-locate again in 2011.”

More than 850 contributors to the GNOME and KDE projects gathered in Gran Canaria last July. The event brought together attendees from 50 countries, and helped raise local awareness of free software and had a measurable impact on the local community. The impact of the event continues to be felt even after the event, with nearly 2 million hits to the summit Web site following the event.

“We were thrilled to have GCDS right here, and felt that it was an enormous boost for our local commitment to free software,” said José Miguel Santos Espino, Director of IT at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. “It’s hard to overstate how important it was to have the opportunity to meet with contributors from GNOME and KDE and learn more about what’s possible on the desktop with free software.”

The projects are seeking a host in Europe at a location that can handle more than 1,000 participants. For detailed requirements, prospective hosts can see the requirements for Akademy (http://ev.kde.org/akademy/requirements.php) and GUADEC (http://live.gnome.org/GuadecPlanningHowTo/CheckList). Applications are welcomed before May 15th and should be sent to the KDE e.V. (kde-ev-board@kde.org) and the GNOME Foundation (board@gnome.org) boards.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

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Mozilla Sponsors GNOME Accessibility Efforts

BOSTON, Mass — February 4, 2010 — The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce a substantial donation from the Mozilla Corporation to benefit the GNOME Project’s accessibility efforts. The donation will help continue the collaborative efforts between GNOME and Mozilla on Accessibility.

The Mozilla Corporation is granting the GNOME Foundation $10,000 for 2010. The funds will be used in part to send GNOME developers to the 25th Annual International CSUN Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference. The CSUN Conference is one of the premier technology conferences for people with disabilities, and by holding a GNOME accessibility hackfest at the conference, GNOME can ensure a diverse group of GNOME developers are immersed in the accessibility space with direct hands-on interaction with end users.

The recent donation from Mozilla continues a long partnership between GNOME and Mozilla for accessibility. The GNOME Foundation received a $10,000 grant in 2008 that was used for the GNOME Accessibility Outreach Program, and resulted in major accessibility improvements.

“The direct impact of the Mozilla funding has allowed GNOME to add Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) support to the Orca screen reader and other accessibility enhancements in GNOME,” said Willie Walker, lead of the GNOME Accessibility Team. “All these helped make GNOME/Firefox a compelling free alternative to commercial products for the visually impaired. As a result, we’re seeing users around the world using GNOME as their every day solution.”

The GNOME Project has worked hard to ensure that all users have the opportunity to enjoy a Free Software desktop. Just as GNOME has had great success making internationalization part of the core platform, accessibility is also taking its place as a core value of the platform. Sending GNOME developers to CSUN will help to ensure that developers working on all areas of GNOME are well-educated on accessibility issues and continue to build accessibility features and functions into GNOME rather than “bolted-on” features.

The GNOME Foundation and Mozilla are committed to open source, open standards, and open formats. Both organizations and their contributors contribute to numerous projects to ensure an open Web and open desktop platform for all users. Part of that effort is working hard to ensure users with physical disabilities are able to make use of a free desktop and Web browser.

“The GNOME Foundation’s commitment to accessibility improves the desktop and Internet experience for millions of people, and Mozilla is proud to support this work,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

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GUADEC 2010 to be held in The Hague, Netherlands

BOSTON, Mass — November 30, 2009 — GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development and user community, as well as many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

The conference will lead up to the GNOME 3.0 release in September 2010. Keeping with the 3.0 theme, the three primary themes for GUADEC 2010 will be Government, education, and end users.

The Hague was one of several locations proposed for GUADEC in 2010. It was chosen in part due to the excellent facilities at the bid site, as well as easily accessible site for those traveling to GUADEC. The conference will be held at the Haagse Hogeschool, the higher vocational education institute in the region with an existing affinity for open source.

“Free Software is of great importance to culture in the digital age,” said Kees Vendrik, Green MP and advocate of open source and open standards in the Dutch public sector. “It offers a fertile feeding ground for education, innovation, and the economy at large. My party is delighted that the GNOME conference is coming to The Netherlands and we believe it will inspire our governmental bodies to put policy into practice.”

The core team of the winning bid consists of Vincent van Adrighem, Koen Martens, Sanne te Meerman, Fabrice Mous, and Reinout van Schouwen. Each of the core team members are well-rooted in the FLOSS community at large, with network spanning the most active FLOSS organizations in The Netherlands.

“We are very excited and honored to host GUADEC next year,” said Reinout van Schouwen. “With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, we’re confident that the conference will be one of the most important ones in the history of the GNOME project. We would like to invite the Free Software communities in our country and abroad to take advantage of this opportunity and show the world that open technology offers solutions for everyone!”

GUADEC is now in its 11th year, and follows a successful joint conference, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), in 2009 with the KDE Project. As planned, GUADEC 2010 will be hosted on its own, but the door is open to another co-hosted event in the future.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said that GCDS was “a great conference, and an opportunity to work with our friends in the KDE Project on areas where both desktops can benefit. We hope to build on that experience this year with GUADEC.”

See the GUADEC Website for more information about the conference. Registration details and information on the call for papers will be up by January 6th. Look for another announcement at that time with more details about the CFP and tracks for GUADEC 2010.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

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Made to Share! GNOME 2.28 Released!

September 23, 2009 — GNOME 2.28 enhances Empathy Instant Messaging, adds official Bluetooth support, and improves other applications and the GNOME Developer Platform.

The GNOME Community is excited to announce the immediate availability of GNOME 2.28. Hundreds of volunteers worldwide have worked over the past six months to deliver improvements to the GNOME Desktop and GNOME Developer Platform.

GNOME 2.28 furthers the GNOME mission by making sure people have a free desktop they can use to communicate with their friends using the latest technology.

GNOME 2.28 delivers a number of new feature enhancements to improve the user experience. GNOME 2.28 adds official support for Bluetooth devices for the first time, including mice, keyboards, mobile phones and other peripherals. Bastien Nocera, one of the leading developers of GNOME’s Bluetooth featureset says: “With the addition of the Bluetooth management tools and the enhancements to our Volume Control applications, we’ve given GNOME users access to more hardware features, whilst keeping our design principles.”

Empathy, GNOME’s instant messenger, built on the Telepathy framework, has seen numerous improvements, including the ability to add custom themes, geolocation support for Jabber clients, and the ability for users to share their desktop with their contacts using the GNOME Remote Desktop server and viewer, Vino and Vinagre. “The Telepathy team is proud of the cooperation between the Empathy, Vino and Vinagre developers. Thanks to their work, our users will be able to easily share their desktop with their contacts without having to care about the underlying technical details. This is a great step for us as it marks the first use in GNOME of the collaborative features offered by the Telepathy framework. We hope to soon see more and more applications integrating Telepathy in order to increase the collaborative user experience in the GNOME desktop,” says Guillame Desmottes, one of the main contributors to Empathy.

Other improvements to the GNOME Desktop include:

  • Cheese, the GNOME webcam application, features an all new wide mode for users with netbooks.
  • GNOME’s web browser, Epiphany, fixed a number of long-standing bugs with the switch to Webkit as its engine.
  • The Evince document viewer has been ported to Microsoft Windows®.
  • Gedit has been ported to Mac OS® X.
  • … and more.

For users with accessibility needs, Orca, the GNOME screen reader application, has seen numerous updates, including support for mouseovers, moving the mouse without performing a click, the ability to pronounce mis-spellled words, and more.

The GNOME Developer Platform has seen significant progress in removing deprecated modules and functionality. In GNOME 2.28, there are no longer any applications that depend on esound, libgnomevfs, libgnomeprint, or libgnomeprintui. GTK+, Glib and other GNOME libraries have also seen improvements.

For the full list of changes, please see the release notes at http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.28/.

About GNOME

The GNOME Project is creating a complete, free and easy-to-use desktop environment for users, as well as a powerful application development framework for software developers. The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions as well as many mobile platforms like cellular phones and tablets.

The GNOME project has three main goals:

  • Free and open source desktop accessible to all. GNOME is a free desktop available to everyone, regardless of language, physical ability, technical expertise.
  • Development platform. GNOME is a powerful development platform for developing free and open source software applications.
  • GNOME Mobile. GNOME technologies provide a foundation for mobile applications from tablets to cellular phones.

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GNOME promotes Software Freedom Day

The GNOME Community is a excited to promote and participate in Software Freedom Day. Around the world, GNOME community members will be celebrating software freedom and the work that GNOME has done to make a free desktop accessible for all.

Software Freedom is about a technology future that we can trust, that is sustainable, and that supports the basic human freedoms. Untrusted electoral systems can lead to civil unrest and a lack of trust in governing bodies. Proprietary data formats can mean lockout to accessing our own information! Software Freedom can be maintained by transparent systems (such as Free and Open Source Software) that are based on open, secure and sustainable standards including data formats and communication protocols.

In addition, software freedom is about making sure that software can be used by all humanity regardless of the language they speak, the amount of money they have or their physical abilities. And this is where GNOME excels. To provide free software to everyone, GNOME is:

Free.

GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project, dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data. Find out more about the GNU project and Free Software at gnu.org.

Usable.

GNOME understands that usability is about creating software that is easy for everyone to use. GNOME’s community of professional and volunteer usability experts have created Free Software’s first and only Human Interface Guidelines, and all core GNOME software is adopting these principles. Find out more about GNOME and usability at the GNOME Usability Project.

Accessible

Free Software is about enabling software freedom for everyone, including users and developers with disabilities. GNOME’s Accessibility framework is the result of several years of effort, and makes GNOME the most accessible desktop for any Unix platform. Find out more at the GNOME Accessibility Project.

International

GNOME is used, developed and documented in dozens of languages, and we strive to ensure that every piece of GNOME software can be translated into all languages. During the last GNOME Development cycle, the GNOME Desktop was translated into over 40 languages!

Developer-friendly

Developers are not tied to a single language with GNOME. You can use C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, and C#, to produce high-quality applications that integrate smoothly into the rest of your UNIX or GNU/Linux (commonly referred to as Linux) desktop.

Organized

GNOME strives to be an organized community, with a foundation of several hundred members, usability, accessibility, and QA teams, and an elected board. GNOME releases are defined by the GNOME Release Team every six months.

Supported

Beyond the worldwide GNOME Community, GNOME is supported by the leading companies using GNU/Linux and UNIX and many free software projects, including Access, Canonical, Debian, Free Software Foundation, HP, Google, IBM, Igalia, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla Foundation, Nokia, Novell, OLPC, Red Hat, Software Freedom Law Center, Sugar Labs and Sun Microsystems. GNOME is proud to be the default Desktop Environment that powers popular distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSolaris.

A community

Perhaps more than anything else, GNOME is a worldwide community of volunteers who hack, translate, design, QA, and generally have fun together.

Please join the GNOME community in celebrating the achievements the free software world has made.

Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

This year’s Gran Canaria Desktop Summit represented the first time the GNOME and KDE communities have co-located their annual conferences in the same location. 852 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together last month to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience at the first ever Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

“The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was a milestone not only for the KDE and GNOME communities, but also for the free desktop in general.” said Cornelius Schumacher, president of KDE e.V., “New collaboration efforts were started and existing ones revitalized. We already have seen results for example in the area of the semantic desktop, and on improving the specification processes on freedesktop.org. I’m sure we’ll see more results in the near future.”

The summit accomplished its goal of increasing co-operation between GNOME and KDE to improve the Free Desktop experience. Throughout the conference there were many examples of successful collaboration including shared technologies, community co-operation and growth of the local free software community.

“I was really excited to see all of the energy at the conference – 800 free desktop supporters in the same building!” said Vincent Untz, Director and Chairman of the GNOME Board. “I heard conversations about search technologies, recruiting developers and marketing. Both our communities benefited and I look forward to seeing the benefits passed on to GNOME users.”

Shared Technology

KDE and GNOME benefit from shared technologies in multimedia, metadata storage, desktop search, application messaging and hardware integration. These shared technologies provide users with improved integration and a consistent user experience. Discussions during the summit resulted in agreements to continue to work on shared technologies, shared interfaces and shared code. In particular, several working sessions around the freedesktop.org initiative resulted in clearer processes for sharing specifications and technologies which will accelerate the ability of both projects and the greater free desktop community to collaborate and communicate with other projects.

Community Co-operation

In the domains where KDE and GNOME share technology, global teams came together to work on more effective ways of collaborating. Members of both communities came together to discuss issues that affected desktop projects, from recruiting and maintaining bugsquad team members to free desktop marketing efforts to kernel technologies that affect both projects. Teams in areas as diverse as the bug squad, accessibility and multimedia teams shared experiences and knowledge, and resolved to work more closely together. The projects share many values like an interest in providing free accessibility to people around the world that can be accomplished better by working together.

Local Free Software Community

Co-locating GUADEC and Akademy resulted in a large number of key free software developers congregating in Gran Canaria. They attracted developers from related projects world wide and invigorated the local software community. GUADEC-es and Akademy-es took also place during the event, as an effort to increase the number of spanish developers involved. The devolpment of an introductory program in spanish for local students and developers allowed the a record number of local free software supporters showed up – over 300 free software supporters from the Canary Islands showed up to listen, participate and discuss free desktop issues with the GNOME and KDE communities. The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was supported by the local free software community which includes strong GNOME and KDE presence through GNOME Hispano and KDE España, including support from The Cabildo of Gran Canaria, both local universities (ULPGC and ULL), ESLIC, ASOLIF, and GULIC, among others.

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was a success. The conversations that started at the summit will have an impact on the upcoming release of the GNOME and KDE desktops and will continue to foster cooperation between the GNOME and KDE communities. The communities are planning cross desktop hackfests to implement the ideas discussed at the summit. Free desktop users can expect to see the results of this conference in upcoming releases of the GNOME and KDE desktops.

GNOME and KDE plan to join together again in future years to make sure they are working effectively together to share technologies and advance the free desktop. The cooperation and conversations that began between the KDE and GNOME communities will continue into the future and in events like hackfests throughout the year, but next year the conferences will be hosted separately. GUADEC and Akademy hope to see both GNOME and KDE developers at their events as their communities work more closely together on joint technologies.

Both projects believe that the co-location of the GNOME conference GUADEC and the KDE conference Akademy was a successful event that brought the two communities together and they look forward to more co-located events in the years to come.

For more information on the organizations mentioned in this press release:

FAQ

Why did you decide to co-locate in 2009?
The GNOME and KDE communities decided to co-locate Akademy and GUADEC so that they could build the free desktop community and cooperate on technologies that make sense for both desktops.

Why did you decide not to co-locate in 2010?
It’s important to us to continue to build the GNOME and KDE brands. In particular, with the release of GNOME 3.0 coming soon, the GNOME community wants to make sure they can focus on that. Both communities want to co-locate again and hope to bring even more free desktop communities.

Will you co-locate in the future?
Yes. We are talking about co-locating events like hackfests now and plan to co-locate Akademy and GUADEC in a Desktop Summit in the future.

Was the conference a success?
Absolutely. The conference was a success for a community and technology perspective and was instrumental in furthering the free desktop movement.

You said the co-location was a success but you’ve decided not to do it again, why?
When we decided to co-locate GUADEC and Akademy we were unsure if it was something we’d do once or every year or every x number of years. We’ve decided it was a success and we’d like to do it again in the future, but not next year. It’s important to us to continue to build the GNOME and KDE brands. In particular, with the release of GNOME 3.0 coming soon, the GNOME community wants to make sure they can focus on that. We will co-locate again in the future.

Where will GUADEC and Akademy be next year?
We don’t know yet but the call for bids will be going out this week.

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