| GNOME 2 | |
|---|---|
 | |
 GNOME 2.18 desktop with Panel | |
| Developer | GNOME Project |
| Initial release | June 26, 2002; 23 years ago (2002-06-26) |
| Final release | 2.32 / September 29, 2010; 15 years ago (2010-09-29) |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Platform | GTK |
| Predecessor | GNOME 1 |
| Successor | GNOME 3,MATE |
| Type | Desktop environment |
| License | GPL-2.0-only |
| Website | gnome.org (archived atWayback Machine) |
GNOME 2 is the second major release of theGNOMEdesktop environment. Building upon the release of GNOME 1, development of GNOME 2 focused on a greaterdesign-oriented approach that simplified and standardized elements of the environment. It also introduced modern font and image rendering, with improvedaccessibility andinternationalization, and improved performance. It was released on June 26, 2002 at theLinux Symposium.
Although officially superseded byGNOME 3, and no longer actively maintained, GNOME 2 became the basis for theMATE desktop environment, which actively continues development. It also helped to inspire theCinnamon desktop environment, and theGNOME Flashback shell session, which both largely retain a similar user experience to GNOME 2, but with modern components.
GNOME 2's initial release was largely an evolution of the final release of GNOME 1, that had introduced both Nautilus (today known asGNOME Files) as itsfile manager, andSawfish as itswindow manager. However, in an effort to simplify its implementation, by the second release of GNOME 2, theMetacity window manager had been adopted. With that, it also included an officiallook and feel, as it adopted theClearlooks theme. For the first time, theGNOME human interface guidelines were published, which attempted to improve overall usability. Tearable (detachable) menus were discontinued by default.
GNOME 2 continued with the generaldesktop metaphor paradigm that GNOME 1 started. An evolvedGNOME Panel remained as itsshell. Users saw the addition offont anti-aliasing, which gave the desktop environment a more refined look in its text rendering.
As GNOME 2's release cycle spanned the course of over eight years, many component libraries andcore applications were introduced and replaced at various points.GStreamer, amultimedia framework, was introduced in 2.2, which later allowed for the inclusion of the Totem multimedia player (known today asGNOME Videos). Epiphany (known today asGNOME Web) was introduced in 2.4.Evince (also known today as GNOME Document Viewer) replaced both GPdf and GGV in version 2.12.
GNOME 1 had implemented theCORBA-compliantobject request broker known as ORBit to serve as itsmessage-oriented middleware. In version 2.2, this middleware was deprecated in favor of the more environment-agnosticD-Bus. As a result,Bonobo, asoftware framework forobject-linking incompound documents that had been built-upon ORBit, was also phased-out.
Although greater overall standardization was a major goal of GNOME 2, it also provided increased functionality in customization, as version 2.2 supported the ability for full icon themes to be applied for the first time.
Discussion around GNOME 2 began as early as 1999, following the initial release of GNOME 1, whenFederico Mena published an early draftroadmap.[1] Gathering from other project leadersMiguel de Icaza andHavoc Pennington, the roadmap roughly detailed overall goals, their dependencies, and time to completion. As early as February 2000, the GNOME Project publicly outlined a plan to have anSDK available by the end of the calendar year.[2] During the firstGUADEC which took place the following month, a non-authoritative GNOME 2.0steering committee was formed, and an updated timeline was created.[3]
On February 13, 2001, theGNOME Foundation Board of Directors met for a special meeting and discussed the launch of GNOME 2.[4] Project co-founder Miguel de Icaza also outlined key points, including which technologies should be adopted via a public document.[5] It was agreed that GNOME 2 should be based-onGTK 2widget toolkit.
Spearheaded by the GNOME Human Computer Interaction team ofSun Microsystems led by Calum Benson, a study was conducted in March 2001, to survey usability of GNOME 1.0.[6] Following, Havoc Pennington, then published an essay titled "Free software and good user interfaces", which advocated for improvement in user interface design, and noted efforts in the upcoming GNOME 2 release.[7] This culminated in the creation of the GNOME Usability Project, which handled publishing of an accompanying set ofhuman interface guidelines. This helped to standardize interface elements in the desktop environment.
GNOME 2 was released on June 26, 2002 at theLinux Symposium inOttawa.[8] Starting with GNOME 2.4, a timed release cadence was adopted, which called for a new version to be released roughly every six months. This effectively resulted in new stable GNOME versions being released every September and March of any given year. This practice is still continued in the modern GNOME release cadence.
| Version | Release date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2.0 | June 26, 2002[8] | Initial release |
| 2.2 | February 5, 2003[9] | |
| 2.4 | September 10, 2003[10] | |
| 2.6 | March 31, 2004[11] | |
| 2.8 | September 15, 2004[12] | |
| 2.10 | March 9, 2005[13] | |
| 2.12 | September 7, 2005[14] | |
| 2.14 | April 15, 2006[15] | |
| 2.16 | September 6, 2006[16] | |
| 2.18 | March 14, 2007[17] | |
| 2.20 | September 19, 2007[18] | |
| 2.22 | March 12, 2008[19] | |
| 2.24 | September 24, 2008[20] | |
| 2.26 | March 18, 2009[21] | |
| 2.28 | September 23, 2009[22] | |
| 2.30 | March 31, 2010[23] | |
| 2.32 | September 29, 2010[24] |
| Requirement | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| Unix-like | ||
| Operating system | BSD,Darwin,HP-UX,Linux,Solaris | |
| CPU | Pentium, 166MHz | Pentium, 400 MHz |
| Memory | 64MB | 128 MB |
| Free space | 341 MB | |
