Gnome Beta 1

I’ve just installed the new Gnome beta release (overview, announcement) and am thrilled with the feature improvements so far. I know it’s a beta release, but it’s been stable and haven’t found much of any breakage… yet… ;)

I couldn’t get evolution to compile and run, but I’ve chatted with a few folks and apparently there’s some serious IMAP bugs still to be ironed out so and it’s considered pretty unstable by the devs, so I would avoid it unless you are looking to do some serious work. Also, after installing the new glib/cairo/gtk+ combo make sure to compile new Mozilla/Firefox without the mozsvg USE flag or it will segfault on startup. There’s also been some changes on the libwnck front (Gnome bug #128380) that led me to use CVS and recompile gnome-panel.

The new Nautilus “spatial tree view” is ok, but I dunno if it’s really an improvement from a usability standpoint. The new browse view with the tree sidebar however is an absolutely wonderful thing. I’ve also finally switched over to using Totem with the Gstreamer backend which works wonderfully along with the pitfdll plugin to pretty much play everything I was able with the Xine backend.

Since I’ve pretty much laid BreakMyGentoo to rest, I’ve been able to actually use someone else’s overlays to install for a change which has been quite nice. For those that are looking, I used Steev’s overlay with very few issues, but there’s also one from kikidonk that looks good.

[edit]: Found a few issues and patches… The first is Gnome #128380 (patch), the second is kinda introduced by the first and is #311819 (patch)