GNOME 2.22 is out and headed for Hardy

The GNOME Foundation released the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment yesterday with several new additions, including something that has been a popular add-on for some time now.

One of the best additions is Cheese, an application similar to Apple’s PhotoBooth, which lets you take pictures and make videos using your computer’s webcam. Several effects can be applied to your images and send them into F-Spot or even set an image as your account photo.

They’ve also added some improved window compositing (Visual Effects in Ubuntu), a new network-transparent virtual filesystem and support for digital television within Movie Player. Evolution has gotten an upgrade to support Google Calendars and custom message labels for email.

Oone of the best additions could be the International Clock, one of the most popular third-party applets for the panels.

There’s a lot more in GNOME 2.22 and you can get the full story in the GNOME 2.22 Release Notes.

I’m also happy to say that not only will GNOME 2.22 be available in Ubuntu Hardy, the packages are already being checked in so it will be available in the next testing release (which is expected to be beta 1).