Gnome Shell 3.6.2 Release

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Tomorrow (Nov 14) Gnome will announce the second and last major bug-fixing release for 3.6 series. That also brings new branches (3.6) for Gnome Software and from now on all the work goes towards to 3.8 series.

Gnome Shell 3.6.2 as it happened with 3.6.1, brings many fixes!

There isn’t a reason to focus to a certain bug fix, just grub something you are interested on and you can read more about it in bugzilla. However you might want to have a closer look to #683060 which fix the screen lock in Ubuntu Unity installations. A long discussion takes place about the incompatibilities of Gnome and Ubuntu regarding GDM and Lightdm.

There is another interesting bug fix #685915 by Neil Roberts which is member of Intel Desktop Visualization Team. Neil fixed a bug with Intel drivers, he committed a patch to Mesa 9, and he also removed some legacy code from Gnome Shell.

The screen grabber was a workaround for an extremely slow path in Mesa when reading back pixel data from the frame buffer. It was using pixel buffer objects by directly calling into GL to hit a fast blit path in Intel’s driver. This should no longer be necessary with the latest Mesa because the normal read pixels path now has a fast path to just memcpy the data. Using PBOs in that case just adds an extra indirection because the data is read into an intermediate buffer and then copied back out again.

We want to be able to remove the dependency on linking against libGL directly from Gnome Shell because that will not work if Cogl is actually using GLES. Also libGL includes GLX which means gnome-shell ends up with a hard dependency on Xlib which hinders the goal of getting Gnome Shell to be a Wayland compositor.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46631
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685915

The actual bug wasn’t important, but the bug report is :)

In detail all changes:

Implement org.gnome.ScreenSaver.GetActiveTime [Giovanni; #686064]
Explicitly load gnome-screensaver when not running GDM [Tim; #683060]
Set Empathy as preferred handler when delegating channels [Xavier; #686296]
Tweak screenShield animations [Rui; #686745]
Restore Fittsability of summary items in message tray [Florian; #686474]
App search: Match GenericName too [Matthias; #687121]
Add setting to force log out menuitem [Matthias; #686057]
Fix auto-scroll to bottom in chat notifications [Sjoerd; #686571]
Update man page [Matthias; #680601]
Hide notifications when closed button is clicked [Jasper, Florian; #682237]
Fix screenshots on Big Endian [Owen; #685915]
Implement ‘disable-user-list’ in login screen [Ray; #660660]

Gnome Shell 3.7 has already many small visual changes

Other Fixes

Error message in ‘Run’ should use a symbolic icon | #686233
userMenu: Hide menu immediately before suspending | #686484
workspacesView: Fix some errors in code paths for non-default settings | #686487
<app> has been added to your favorites.” message appears as left-to-right in Hebrew locale | #686630
messageTray: Fix lightbox | #686728
close-window.svg is overscaled in GNOME shell | #686574
messageTray: Fix close button position in RTL locales (gnome-3-6) | #686879
Extensions should be disabled in lock screen | #686763
screen locks with modals still up | #685239
Drop unnecessary libedataserverui dependency | # 687189
log out not offered when logged in as root | #686736
Regression: Dash item labels fail to report accessible names | #686583
Misc fixes for the login dialogs | #687132
power: “0 minutes remaining” when exactly 60 minutes are remaining | #687958
Screen shield is not lowered on automatic suspend, session can never be unlocked on resume | #687020
prevent lock in initial-setup mode | #687708
messageTray: Hide summary notification immediately when closing the tray | # 686888
Dash resize is delayed until you enter the overview | #686530
Text fields in password dialogs expand behavior inconsistent | #684810
Minor loginDialog fixes | #688181

Mutter 3.6.2 had one bug fix :)

Only process keyboard mapping events for the core X keyboard [Rui; #674859]

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Philip Witte

Arch got the update today :)

JJ

I moved to arch in hope of getting latest versions of gnome. But there is no way to get the development versions even in arch. Gnome unstable is updated only two week or so before the release and is moved to main almost after one month. With ubuntu I could use the ricotz testing to move to development versions very easily. But now when I read ur comment, I really miss arch!!

Philip Witte

They don’t release Gnome-Shell as soon as it comes out, because there’s a lot of things they have to build/check to make sure all the packages are stable. Gnome is a big project, it takes time.

There used to be Gnome-Shell-git packages int he AUR, but it looks like they’re out-of-date now.

Sriram Ramkrishna

Our infrastructure needs work, but ideally we would like to have builds every day for people to test out so that they can more easily participate in the designs and give feedback.
Anon

They have a separate [gnome-unstable] repo just for this purpose.

JJ

why don’t provide the unstable from the start of the new cycle? unstable is updated just 2 or so weeks before final release. This will also help in finding bugs early in the cycle and have a stable gnome within a weeks time to the main repo

Michael Mistretta

I have to ask — is this will be coming to UGR Ubuntu 12.10?

alex285

Sure, I don’t know when, in the next few days I guess.

RambJoe

Is it just me or has the option to make the text small gone? Very disapointing if it has, I can’t bare the regular text size.

edit: Thankfully, gnome-tweak-tool lets you easily change this, but it’s sad when they remove this functionality when I personally thing the small text would be better as DEFAULT. But I guess it’s safer to have it start off with big text so those with bad eyes or high DPI screens can see.

Sriram Ramkrishna

You usually can change this through accessibility. What have you been using before?

RambJoe

That’s how I used to do it, but now there is no longer a drop down box. There is just an option to toggle large text.

http://jeremy.bicha.net/ Jeremy Bicha

You can use Tweak Tool and adjust the Fonts>Text scaling factor to whatever you like.

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