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Announcing: GNOME 2.4.0 Desktop & Developer Platform

Submitted by stro on Wed, 2003-09-10 16:57. Gnome 2.x
Gnome 2.x

In the 13th century, a man called Temujin came to be known as Genghis Kahn,
"Greatest of Rulers" and "Warrior of Warriors". By the time of his death,
the Mongol empire extended from Hungary to Korea, and from Siberia to Tibet.

Often referred to as 'the Mongol hordes', and considered barbaric, his army
was, in reality, a thoroughly modern military outfit in medieval times. They
were swift, precise, equipped with superior technology, ingenious in their
approach to war, keenly organised and consistently outnumbered - not that it
detracted from their exploits on the battlefield.These same qualities have been instrumental to GNOME's success. Our regular,
high quality releases, speedy turnaround, fresh approach to Free Software
usability and dynamic organisation have supercharged the project - you can
sense the deep, personal pride in every aspect of our work, from the source
code to the translations that make GNOME a comfortable home for our users
all around the world.

So it is in the spirit of Temujin and his nomadic warriors that we bring you
The GNOME 2.4.0 Desktop & Developer Platform.

Released on schedule, to the day, it is the culmination of six months effort
by GNOME contributors around the world: hackers, documentors, usability and
accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, sysadmins, companies,
artists, users and testers. Due to their hard work, we have another great
release to be proud of - thanks very much to every GNOME 2.4.0 contributor!

You'll find plenty of information about GNOME 2.4 in our extensive release
notes, linked from the 2.4 start page. You can also check out our gallery of
cool screenshots from dedicated GNOME users and testers!

While you are enjoying 2.4, the GNOME development team is rushing back to
the coalface, eager to work on awesome new stuff for our next release - in
fact, we've already started! Stay tuned for more information about the 2.5
development series, coming soon...

- The GNOME Release Team

GNOME 2.4: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/
Release Notes: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/notes/
GNOME FTP: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/2.4/

Also, Andrew Sobala notes:
"Many thanks to all the people who sent me screenshots; I'm sorry that
for various reasons, there were a very few great screenshots that I
couldn't use."

Re: It's a bad comparison

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2003-09-11 10:06.

Success is *not* the only judge on the Earth of right or wrong. Clearly, Hitler was wrong about that too. Plenty of torturing dictators have ruled a long time, pillaged their country's economy, retired at a ripe old age, and died surrounded by wealth and flunkeys. They didn't somehow become right where Hitler was wrong.

And the Mongols killed an incredible number of people, partly to intimidate the rest, but partly just because as nomads, by killing all the farmers and city-folk and burning the farms and so forth, they created territory they could live in and their opponents could not. Cold-blooded slaughter and destruction for the sake of logistics. And we think only moderns twigged to that idea . . .

That said, I can see the point the Gnomies are trying to make--Mongols kicked ass, so do we. Mongols dominated the known world, so will we. I dunno . . . maybe try some other theme next time. Something classical Greek, perhaps--the Greeks dominated the *intellectual* world for centuries, and they did it with a wide-open bazaar of ideas rather than central domination. And when it counted, they united to kick the Persian empire's butt.

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