GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.2: "Life Preserver"
=========================================================

At long last, the GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.2 "Life Preserver",
is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is available for
immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.

Detailed information about this release (with screenshots this time!):

  http://gnome.org/start/2.1/

Download:

  http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/2.1/2.1.2/sources/

  tar.gz:   90M total
  tar.bz2:  68M total


WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
--------------------------

This release is an UNSTABLE development series snapshot. It is intended for
testing and hacking purposes ONLY. Like the Linux kernel, GNOME uses odd
minor version numbers to indicate development status, so this 2.1.x series
will eventually become the official 2.2 release. Please check our schedule
for more info: http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/schedule/


New Features
------------

  - Notification tray (previously in the system-tray-applet module) has been
    integrated into the Panel.

  - Integrated themes control panel.

  - Extended proxy configuration control panel.

  - Updated Sawfish, librep and rep-gtk. Note that GNOME distributed a
    misnamed 2.0 version of Sawfish with GNOME 2.0.x - the 1.2 version is in
    fact newer.

  - Updated Pango, GTK+ and intltool.

  - gnome-vfs network: scheme, which links to the SMB/CIFS workgroup browser
    and your list of favourite servers.

  - gnome-media has seen lots of bugfixing, with the Sound Recorder being
    ported to GStreamer. This will be included if GStreamer is accepted as a
    Desktop module.

  - At long last, Ian McKellar has revived panel transparency! It's now a
    property of the "Color" background type, so you can add an extra alpha
    level to the colour of your panels. A lot of people will enjoy this
    addition.

Features added in 2.1.1:

  - New "Open Recent" item in the Actions menu lists recently used files.

  - Faster file-roller, includes suport for recent files and GNOME icon
    themes.

  - Iagno is harder. :-)

  - Plenty of bug fixes in gnome-media, including better support for devfs.

  - gnome-applets bugfixes.

  - gedit includes a new sort plugin, auto-indentation, UI improvements and
    bugfixes.

  - New PangoLayout wrap mode (as seen in Nautilus), general Pango bugfixes.

  - Nautilus now supports multihead, PangoLayout wrapping in icon mode, and
    recent files.

  - Emblems are now handled within the icon themes system, and there's a
    cool emblems sidebar!

  - Lots of fixes on linc, ORBit2 and bonobo-activation.

Features added in 2.1.0:

  - Detailed control over fonts, anti-aliasing and subpixel smoothing in the
    Fonts control panel. Control anti-aliasing on-the-fly! As seen in Red
    Hat 8.0.
  
  - New tab in the Themes control panel provides metacity window border
    theme selection.
  
  - Windows control panel for window manager selection and options.
  
  - gedit has a new plugins, including a spelling checker, Galeon-style tab
    control, improved UTF8 support and a most recently used files list.
    Check out the recent files list dropdown on the 'Open' toolbar button!
  
  - Panel multiscreen support, zoom animation when launchers are clicked.
  
  - New panel buttons for Screenshot, Search, Show Desktop (actually an
    applet) and Run.
  
  - gdialog is back! Improved, and built by default in gnome-utils again.
  
  - Search Tool user interface completely revamped, supports Nautilus icons
    and drag'n'drop.
  
  - Nautilus now has an extensible thumbnailing system. See Alex Larsson's
    post on nautilus-list about ~/.gnome2/thumbnailrc.
  
  - freedesktop.org system icon theme support in Nautilus (see
    gnome-icon-theme).
  
  - New icon layout/canvas, general performance fixes, and a new rename
    widget with i18n support.
  
  - Improved Nautilus side pane based on standard widgets.
  
  - Requires the 1.1.x development series of Pango, which supports Xft2 and
    fontconfig.
  
  - New 'gman' alias for yelp, which handily pops up the man page index.
    This feature dedicated to Glynn Foster.


Preview Modules
---------------

The following modules have been proposed for addition to the 2.2 Desktop
release, and have been included in this release for preview and testing:

  - gnomemeeting: A video and audio conferencing client based on the h323
    standard protocol (pwlib and openh323 support libraries are available at
    http://www.gnomemeeting.org/).

  - startup-notification: A minimal library that supports the new startup
    notification spec from freedesktop.org.

  - gstreamer/gst-plugins: An advanced multimedia framework.

  - gst-player: A media player based on GStreamer.

  - nautilus-media: GStreamer-based multimedia support for Nautilus,
    including an awesome new music view and video thumbnailing.

  - galeon: The incredible GNOME web browser, lovingly ported to GNOME 2.x.

  - ggv: The ever-popular PDF and PostScript viewer.

  - acme: A daemon and configuration utility for 'special' keys on modern
    multimedia keyboards and notebooks.

Modules in the proposed list since 2.1.0:

  - gnome-themes: New package of default themes for GNOME, which currently
    includes GTK+ and icon themes designed for accessibility.
  
  - gnome-icon-theme: Default GNOME icon theme.
  
  - metacity: Window manager for the adult in you. Proposed to replace
    Sawfish as default window manager.
  
  - vte: Terminal widget with improved font, internationalisation and
    accessibility support. Designed to replace libzvt.
  
  - file-roller: Full-featured archive creation, browsing, and unpacking
    utility. See: http://fileroller.sourceforge.net/
  
  - gcalctool: Scientific calculator. Proposed to replace gnome-calculator.


Build Requirements
------------------

  - The tarballs included in the release. :-)

  - Some very basic packages not distributed with this release, such as
    image libraries, popt and freetype. These should all be included with or
    available for your distribution.

  - Xft2 and fontconfig for superior font rendering and configuration, from
    http://fontconfig.org/ These are not required, but strongly recommended.

  - Docbook DTD 4.1.2, Docbook XSL stylesheets and a valid system catalogue
	file for scrollkeeper (which in turn is required by many desktop
	components for documentation).


Happy testing!

- The GNOME Release Team