Well, a little over three months have gone by and we're now ready to release an update to SXDE - Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08.
SXDE 1/08 comes with an upgrade of the GNOME desktop to 2.20. You can get a full list of the new features in the GNOME 2.20 release notes. Enhancements include:
- Atpoke is replaced by Accerciser which is a utility that allows you to explore an applications accessibility support features.
- Improvements to style, layout and performance of the help system.
- The Orca screen reader is updated to provide greatly improved support for OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin and Java applications.
- Improvements to the GNOME image viewer, eog. Its faster and more stable and allows you to view image metadata (like
EXIF data). - Evince, the GNOME PDF viewer, now supports interactive PDF forms.
- Gedit, the text editor, now includes syntax highlighting for PHP and Ruby.
The desktop now includes Xvnc and the RealVNC vncviewer client to connect to remote VNC servers. Our teams are distributed around the globe and its often really helpful to be able to share a desktop across the network - for demos, shared presentations and so on. Xvnc and vncviewer are really good tools for this.
SXDE also includes a new CIFS service which makes Solaris a great file server for Windows and MacOS clients.
Driver support has also improved with support for nVidia and ATI cards now integrated to Solaris. Power management is improved with the integration of support for the Suspend to RAM "Sleep" and the Enhanced Speedstep CPU Power Management feature.
All good stuff.