Category: News

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LhY7rpWXm1Y%3Frel%3D0%26showinfo%3D0

GNOME 3.22 was released today, marking the culmination of 6 months work by the GNOME community. The new release introduces major new features as well as many smaller enhancements and fixes. Announcing the release, Matthias Clasen said: “This six-month effort wouldn’t have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world: developers, designers, documentation writers, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, students, system administrators, companies, artists, testers and last, not least, users. GNOME would not exist without all of you. Thank you to everyone!”.

The latest GNOME release introduces comprehensive Flatpak integration for the first time. Flatpak, the next generation application framework for Linux, provides cross-distribution applications that are more secure than traditional Linux apps. GNOME 3.22 makes it easy to install Flatpak apps using the Software application. GNOME’s developer technologies also make it easy to take full advantage of Flatpak’s security features.

GNOME’s Files application has a wealth of improvements in 3.22. A powerful new feature allows multiple files to be renamed at once and compressed file functionality has also been integrated. There are also numerous other user interface improvements.

Other major new features for GNOME 3.22 include a new Photo sharing feature, redesigned keyboard settings, NickServ integration in Polari (GNOME’s IRC application), enhanced support for the Wayland display server, and a much improved Software application.

GNOME 3.22 is significant for developers, also. GTK+, GNOME’s interface toolkit, has introduced a new stable release series which will make it easier for application developers to use the many enhancements introduced during the 3.x series. GLib and GTK+ now provide transparent access to Flatpak “portals”, which allow isolated sandboxed applications to be developed. Builder, the GNOME IDE, has a range of enhancements, including a new built-in profiler. Other improvements include the introduction of CSS blend modes in GTK+, support for OpenGL for Embedded Systems (known as OpenGL ES or GLES) in GtkGLArea and a comprehensive upgrade to GLib’s logging functions.

More information about the latest version of GNOME can be found in the release notes.

GNOME 3.22 is codenamed “Karlsruhe”, in recognition of this year’s GUADEC organizing team.

Press

This article can be freely reproduced with no attribution required. Press queries can be directed to gnome-press-contact@gnome.org. A screenshot pack is available for download.

It is with great pleasure that the GNOME Foundation announces next year’s GUADEC to be held in Manchester, United Kingdom during the summer of 2017. The GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) brings together hundreds of users and developers every year to further the GNOME Project. It is one of the Foundation’s longest-standing and most noteworthy events.

Manchester is located about 160 miles (260 km) northwest of London, with Manchester Airport providing easy access for international guests, as well as plenty of public transportation. It has a long history of being a place of learning and innovation, with over 20 Nobel Prize winners having worked or studied in Manchester, Chetham’s Library being the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, and notable accomplishments like the splitting of the atom by Ernest Rutherford in the early 1900s.

The GNOME Foundation looks forward to hosting the 2017 GUADEC in Manchester, and expects GUADEC 2017 to take place during the last weekend of July. Final dates will be announced in the upcoming months.

GUADEC is the GNOME Foundation’s primary annual event, held every year in a different European city. The conference brings together contributors, enthusiasts, and partners from around the world for three days of talks, followed by three days of workshops (called “Birds of a Feather” sessions). This year, the event took place in Karlsruhe, Germany between the 12th and 17th of August. As always, the conference was a great opportunity for contributors from around the world to meet, make plans, and have fun.

Presentations covered significant developments in GNOME technologies such as Flatpak, GNOME Software, Builder, and new GTK+ features. There were also talks by GNOME’s partners, including Red Hat, SUSE, and Endless. In addition, the Foundation announced the debut of its newest conference, LAS GNOME, to be held this September in Portland, Oregon. In case you couldn’t make it, here’s a link to the 2016 GUADEC talks.

GUADEC couldn’t happen without the hard work of local volunteers who organize each conference, nor without the support of our sponsors. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped to make this year’s conference a success.

As has become tradition in recent years, the GNOME Release Team will be adopting “Karlsruhe” as the code name for the upcoming GNOME release, version 3.22 — now just a couple of weeks away!

Here is a gallery of pictures from the event. You can browse more or add your own here: GUADEC 2016 photos.

Enjoy!

Photo credits: Jonathan Kang, Oliver Propst & Carla Quintana Carrasco

On July 11th, GNOME’s Maps application stopped working. Like all mapping applications, it relies on an online service to provide data. The service it had been using – MapQuest – discontinued free access to their data. When the service went dead, there were no longer any maps in Maps.

Thankfully, it didn’t take long for a replacement to be found. Mapbox, a popular mapping service (they provide data for Pinterest, Github and Foursquare, among others) stepped up and has generously offered to provide mapping data. Better than that, Maps now has an agreement in place with its data provider, putting it on a much more solid footing. The new arrangement with Mapbox might also allow additional features in the future, such as downloading maps data for offline use.

A new version of Maps that uses Mapbox was released last week – if your version of Maps isn’t working, upgrade and it will be fixed.

Big thanks to Mapbox for stepping up and helping out!

ORINDA, CA. The GNOME Foundation welcomes its new Board of Directors for the upcoming 2016 – 2017 term:

• Alexandre Franke
• Allan Day
• Cosimo Cecchi
• Jim Hall
• Meg Ford
• Nuritzi Sanchez
• Shaun McCance

Congratulations!

This year we had 253 registered voters, 142 of which sent in valid ballots. Elections ran during the months of May and June, and the new Board was officially announced on June 18, 2016.

The Board of Directors is a team of volunteers who are elected for a one-year term by GNOME Foundation members. The Board is an important part of the GNOME Foundation and ensures the health of the organization by working on operational and legal items that help keep the Foundation in order. It also helps to manage the relationship with the Advisory Board and promotes the overall well-being of the GNOME Project. This year’s Board has experience that spans the GNOME project including expertise in design, development, usability, and communications.

Outgoing members of the Board include Ekaterina Gerasimova, Jean Francois Fortin Tam, and Andrea Veri. The GNOME Foundation thanks them for their time on the Board, and for helping the Foundation navigate important matters during their term, like the Groupon Trademark Infringement battle which became a success and victory.

Since their official election in June, the new Board has been onboarded by last year’s Board, and outgoing members have begun to transition responsibility to new members. The remaining responsibilities will be handed over during the annual GUADEC conference in Karlsruhe, Germany this August. At that time, the new Board will vote on the position of each member. “I’m very excited to work with the incoming Directors and am looking forward to meeting them in person at GUADEC.” – says Shaun McCance, current Chairperson and President of the Board.

You can find out more about the GNOME Board by visiting the Foundation page of our website, or you can contact the Board directly by sending an email to board@gnome.org.

The GNOME Foundation thanks everyone who participated in this year’s Board of Directors elections, and extends a special thanks to the election committee for planning and executing a successful election process.

Welcome to our new Board!

LAS GNOME is the conference to attend if you want to create a business around Linux-based applications, release your applications to multiple distributions at the same time, and/or create the conditions necessary to reach a wider audience for your current Linux apps.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Ecosystem: business, legal, community, and social issues
• Platforms: deep low-level topics around hardware, drivers, and tools
• Distribution: collaborating with established distributions (like OpenSuse), inter-distribution cooperation, QA and continuous integration.
• Development: toolkits, X/Wayland, security, runtimes, SDK, development tools.

Proposals by newcomers and experienced speakers are welcomed alike. When submitting your proposal, please keep in mind that talk slots are 45 minutes long.

The call for talks will have the following timeline:

        July 15th: deadline for submitting your talk proposals through http://lasreg.gnome.org/

        August 1st: speakers will be notified if their talk has been accepted

        September 19th-21st: core conference days in Portland, Oregon

The papers team is looking forward to your talk proposal. In case of questions regarding the call for talks, please contact the papers team at papers@las.gnome org. For general questions regarding the conference, please consult the LAS GNOME website or contact the LAS GNOME organizing team.

ORINDA, CA. The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the Libre Application Summit — hosted by GNOME (LAS GNOME), which will be held on September 19 – 23 in Portland, Oregon. LAS GNOME is a new conference that aims to advance the state of the GNU/Linux application ecosystem by increasing collaboration with the Linux Kernel and major Linux distributions, and by attracting and empowering application developers both big and small.

Companies and individuals alike will mix with members from a diverse set of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. Together, they will collaborate on actionable goals to further evolve the application market in GNU/Linux, create and design better application development tools, and improve the developer and user experience in general for the GNU/Linux desktop. The event will also focus on the social and community aspects of FOSS application development.

GNOME technologies will be showcased at LAS GNOME as an example of how we create, distribute, and form communities around applications for both commercial and noncommercial purposes. We encourage the larger Free and Open Source community to support this effort by attending this conference and learning more about how we can create momentum around a GNU/Linux application ecosystem.

You can find out more and register for LAS GNOME at las.gnome.org. Please help make LAS GNOME a success by attending and promoting this event!

Photo: “Tilikum Crossing”, CC-BY-SA 4.0 MojaveNC 

ORINDA CA. The GNOME Project thanks Red Hat for their recent donation of two new servers. The donation is part of a wider plan aiming to consolidate the location of the various GNOME servers around the globe into one single datacenter. This will help ease day-to-day operations and reduce intervention time in the case of network disruptions or outages.

Each donated server has 128GB of RAM, 48 cores and comes with an Enterprise SSD made for high throughput. This will greatly improve the running of services like build.gnome.org and sdk.gnome.org.

Once again, the GNOME Project thanks Red Hat for their continued sponsorship of servers, internet bandwidth and local hardware-related IT support.

ORINDA CA. The GNOME Project is delighted to announce that it has received the donation of a large number of ARM hardware, which will be used for development and testing purposes. These donations were made by a variety of companies, including ARM, Banana Pi, Codethink, Endless and Qualcomm. We would like to offer our sincere thanks to each of these partners for their help in this important initiative.

The donated systems will be used to build and test GNOME technologies and applications on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the ARM architecture. This will allow binary GNOME releases for ARM, as a part of the sdk.gnome.org initiative. ARM support for the GNOME Continuous project is also planned, so that the latest development versions of the whole GNOME stack will be continuously built and tested on ARM architectures.

The ability to run GNOME software on ARM architectures promises to open up a range of computing devices to GNOME developers and distributors. This includes low cost desktop devices, including Raspberry Pi and Endless. It also opens the possibility of running GNOME software on mobile devices more easily. In so doing, these donations help to further GNOME’s mission to bring complete Free Software solutions to as many people as possible.

The following companies and people helped secure ARM donations for the Foundation:

ARM
Andrew Wafaa from ARM quickly responded to our request and reached out internally to find us some hardware. In just a few weeks, he was able to secure an OVERDRIVE 3000 from SoftIron which has an octa-core AMD Opteron A1100 64-bit Cortex A57 ARM processor with 16Gb of RAM and 1TB hard disk. This machine is already hosted in the Red Hat Phoenix datacenter where other GNOME servers are located.

Banana Pi
Leo Xu from Banana Pi reached out to us and donated a total of five Single Board Computers with different Allwinner ARM chips. We will send them to developers interested in enabling such hardware for use with GNOME.

Codethink & Endless
Paul Sherwood from Codethink reached out to us offering us several blades on Codethink’s HP Moonshot system hosted by them in the UK. Endless is sponsoring a project with Codethink to use this hardware to make xdg-app runtime, SDK and app builds for ARM.

Qualcomm
Manik Taneja and Victor Ruiz from Canonical reached out to Ketal Gandhi at Qualcomm about GNOME’s need for ARM hardware. Gandhi was able to have Qualcomm donate four Dragonboard 410c Single Board Computers from the 96boards project. These boards will provide a great platform for application developers who want to test their apps in ARM.

Other Sources of Help

The Foundation would also like to give its thanks to several other people who offered help:

• Arc Riley who kindly offered rack space
• Michael Larabel from Phoronix who offered a lot of unused PandaBoards
• Kevin Fenzi from Fedora who offered hardware from the Fedora infrastructure
• Mikael Frykholm from Tranquillity Hosting offered us rack space
• David Tischler from miniNodes offered to buy Raspberry Pi 3s for us if needed
• Yann Leger from Scaleway who committed to offer ARM servers in the future

Some of the donated ARM boards have already been sent to GNOME contributors to begin development, and the Foundation encourages others to get involved.

Thanks once again to all concerned – the GNOME Foundation sincerely appreciates the support.