dropline GNOME 2.16.1 Available.

After two months of building and refining this release, we’ve finally come to a point at which we’re pleased with the results and are ready to break the news that dropline GNOME 2.16.1 is complete! It’s been quite a game of “Let’s just try to fix *one more* bug”, or “Let’s tidy up that minor detail that’s been bugging us for a while.” Finally, we have what we believe is our best GNOME desktop yet!

There have been several changes since our previous major release. As part of our efforts to slim things down, the total number of packages has been decreased by almost 13%. This was possible by eliminating rebuilds of several packages that are now included in Slackware by default, and restructuring the multimedia framework to eliminate several libraries that we felt weren’t needed. Additionally, we’ve also made the decision to discontinue the inclusion of a custom X11 build with this release, as we’ve found that Slackware’s X11 6.9.0 build was more than suitable.

It should also be noted that for automounting and file alteration monitoring to work properly you will need kernel Linux 2.6.17 or greater. Please see the requirements page for more details.

This release also sports a new default GTK and Metacity theme; TwoSixteen, from our very own Silvestre Herrera (aka ertz).

GNOME 2.16 has many speed improvements that are the result of optimization efforts that have been in-progress since 2.12.0 was released last year. Our goal with this release has been to make everything smaller, faster, and more refined than previous releases. We are quite pleased with the results, and hope that you will be as well.

Thank you for using dropline GNOME 2.16!

-The dropline GNOME Development Team.