Lets do the same order as the gnome release notes only with my opinion about them and of the items that deserve a little more attention.

Brasero

Brasero always seemed to be the burning tool to use under linux. Or the one most used. It didn’t made much sense to have nautilus-cd-burner (which has been removed in gnome 2.26) while most people preferred brasero. Brasero is also integrated in nautilus (go to Applications -> System Tools -> CD/DVD Creator) and seems to be offering the same as nautilus-cd-burner had. I didn’t test it yet. In my opinion it’s a wise decision of gnome to make the move to brasero.

Brasero screenshot

Brasero in nautilus

Totem

This is a good example of a feature that might be required by some people but is useless for most. Quote from the release notes:

While GNOME’s Media Player already has the ability to display subtitles for a movie, this still required you to have the subtitle data available. As of GNOME 2.26, this restriction is gone. Using the new subtitle downloader plugin, the Media Player will automatically find subtitles for you.

I don’t understand why they bother to add in features like that (and remember they did add in youtube support in either gnome 2.22 or 2.24) that are pointless for most people. This should be just a plugin that you can download somewhere but not a new feature mentioned in the release notes.

Updated sound preferences for PulseAudio

Now this is an interesting one! PulseAudio is in Fedora since release 8 and ubuntu has it since 8.04 so it was about time that those volume controls where going to work with PulseAudio instead of against it (or so it seemed sometimes). Sadly the application that gnome posts in a screenshot is nowhere to be found on my ubuntu 9.04 Beta (fully updated) machine so i can’t really say more about it without seeing it for myself.

Multiple monitors

If you have just one monitor you probably don’t care about this but it’s something that was divided in the past. Ubuntu had it’s own application to get this. Fedora had one and there where a few others floating around. Far from an ideal situation. Now Gnome has updated his display program to support multiple screens. This was all possible with the xrandr command line tool but a graphical frontend it quite handy for things like this. It’s becoming a nice tool now and way more centralized then then it used to be.

Epiphany

This browser for (and by) Gnome looks clean but has a lot of potential. I will write a bigger article or perhaps a review about this one later. What they added here is Firefox’s “Awsome Bar“… it looks funny and seems to be running fast from what i’ve seen so far. It’s definitely a browser to check out and see if you like it.

Epiphany - Note the wrong render of the legend box. That's bad and ugly! (no issue in Firefox)

Overall Gnome 2.26 impression

With the previous 2 releases (2.22 and 2.24) i found the release notes weak and more useless stuff that was added then useful stuff. Back then it seemed (to me) that they added what was popular at the time. Google had just bought Youtube and they felt some need to implement that in Totem. This time they did also include stuff that strikes me as useless but the majority seems to be useful for everyday Gnome usage. This release was a good one, despite the additions that i rather didn’t see, for Gnome although not much changed visually. This seems to be the release i’ve been hoping for since roughly 2.20. A release where they finally fixed the things that needed fixing and add the things that are needed.

Next in 6 months: Gnome 2.28

There are already some ideas for the next Gnome version. At this moment only the Artwork section for the next gnome has been filled in and that looks promising. If you want to have a look at it click here.

I hope you liked this small review of interesting new and updated Gnome 2.26 features.

Till next time,
Mark.

I was playing around with gnome and openbox (and compiz) and to my surprise i didn’t had any decorations in gnome anymore when i switched back to just gnome (no openbox nor compiz). I did a search on google to try and find the fix but sadly there wasn’t any good one. People with similar problems got the suggestion to add metacity in the gnome-session tool which should also work but isn’t the solution because it simply isn’t in there when everything is working and when you didn’t screw with other windows managers yet.

So i did a search on my other pc where it was all working fine to see where metacity really has to be enabled. It turns out that you have to be in gconf to do that!
But not on this gconf location: “/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager” like what was suggested in ubuntu’s forums. You have to be in this location: “/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager” illustrated by the screenshot below.

And make sure the key (selected row in the image): “windowmanager” is set to “metacity“.
You can access that same tool by pressing: ALT +  F2 then type in: “gconf-editor“.

If you don’t have that tool or don’t know how to get it you can insert the metacity value directly with this line:
“gconftool-2 -s -t string /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager metacity”
You can just enter that line in the run box (again by pressing ALT + F2).

Also note that if you encounter a bug like this, no decorations while you had them, and you didn’t edited files yourself but just installed and removed packages that your distribution provides then it’s a bug in those packages and should be reported. So if it’s not reported please do so to help your distribution get better.

I hope this helped anyone with a similar issue,
Mark.

Gnome 2.22 introduced quite a few new features and not all of them are working nicely.
The automatic adjusting of the brightness in Gnome 2.22 is a good example of a horrible feature. The idea is good but it simply isn’t working out, at least on my notebook, so therefore it’s best to just turn it off.

In the “Power Management Settings” is a option to turn it off, or that’s what you would think judging the name. The setting is: “Dim display when idle”. Turning that off won’t help a bit. might be a bug, might be intentional, but it’s not working.

The real trick to turn this setting off is in the gconf settings. In your distribution install the package: “gconf-editor” (in fedora it’s with “yum -y install gconf-editor”).

Now press ALT+F2 and type: gconf-editor. The editor will popup. Now go to this location: /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight/enable and you should see something like this:

Uncheck the “enable” and your done. No more irritating backlight changes.

Hope that helped for you,
Mark.