Ottawa, Canada — (press release excerpt) — The GNOME Foundation today released version 2.0 of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform at the Ottawa Linux Symposium. With the inclusion of GNOME 2.0 by leading Linux and Unix vendors later this year, users of GNOME can look forward to an improved user environment for existing GNOME applications, including a faster and more powerful Nautilus file manager,… features that are better organized and usability-tested, dozens of useful utilities, applications and even games. Users and administrators will also see a new, simplified configuration system. Developers can look forward to more efficient application development with stronger integration of GNOME APIs and the advantages of GNOME's component-based architecture.

GNOME 2.0 has a host of advanced accessibility features for users with disabilities and a built-in accessibility framework for developers to meet Section 508 requirements. Developers of GNOME 2.0 have devoted thousands of man-hours to ensuring that GNOME will be accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. More features and enhanced accessibility capabilities will be added later this year.

GNOME 2.0 boasts some significant advances for developers, including an enhanced GTK Toolkit, new libraries and widgets, as well as the unparalleled advantages of GNOME's component-based architecture. GNOME's libraries are available for use in any application, without fees, under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

GNOME 2.0 is the first of the GNOME 2.x series. Future releases will bring more features to the core desktop, while adding GNOME 2 native versions of popular applications such as Evolution, Galeon, Mozilla and Gnumeric.

Developers and users wishing to install the GNOME 2.0 Desktop and Developer Platform may freely download the software at www.gnome.org. The software includes the GNOME 2.0 desktop interface, file manager, menus and utilities, as well as the complete set of development tools and libraries.

GNOME 2.0 versions of popular applications will be available later this year. GNOME 2.0 will be available later this year on the Solaris (TM) Operating Environment, HP-UX and Red Hat Linux, as well as being distributed by Ximian and other Linux distributions as part of their offerings.

 
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