Welcome to the new GNOME development cycle! Please fasten your seat belt: you're going to see a lot of exciting new changes!, new features!, new bugfixes!, new translations!, new documentation!. Lots of modules have great plans for 2.18 and if you're willing to help, there's a lot of areas where you'll be heartily welcomed! Don't hesitate to ask how or where you can help. If you don't even know where to start, just send a mail to our fantastic gnome-love mailing list.

This is our first development release on our road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. And I can tell you that GNOME 2.17.1 tastes good. Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it.

To compile GNOME 2.17.1, you can use GARNOME (http://www.gnome.org/projects/garnome/, which supports users and has additional/different modules available), or the jhbuild (http://www.gnome.org/~jamesh/jhbuild.html) modulesets (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release) available at:

http://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/2.17.1/

The release notes that describe the changes between 2.16.1 and 2.17.1 are available. Go read them to learn all the goodness of this release:

platform - http://download.gnome.org/platform/2.17/2.17.1/NEWS
desktop - http://download.gnome.org/desktop/2.17/2.17.1/NEWS
admin - http://download.gnome.org/admin/2.17/2.17.1/NEWS
bindings - http://download.gnome.org/bindings/2.17/2.17.1/NEWS

The GNOME 2.17.1 release is available here:

platform sources - http://download.gnome.org/platform/2.17/2.17.1/
desktop sources - http://download.gnome.org/desktop/2.17/2.17.1/
admin sources - http://download.gnome.org/admin/2.17/2.17.1/
bindings sources - http://download.gnome.org/bindings/2.17/2.17.1/


WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
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This release is a snapshot of development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status.

For more informations about 2.17, the full schedule, the official module lists and the proposed modules list, please see our new shiny 2.17 page:

http://www.gnome.org/start/unstable/


We hope you'll love it,

The GNOME Release Team