A major update to the one of the free software world’s most popular desktop environment, GNOME has been released.

The new version bumps GNOME to 2.24 and this new release boasts some significant new features and updates many core GNOME applications to new versions. Read the release notes.

Among the new additions is a brand new instant messaging client called Empathy, a new release of VoIP client Ekiga, updates to the file manager (including tabbed file management), accessibility features and a whole host of developer stuff.

It also introduces the new GNOME Mobile platform, designed for bringing the GNOME desktop environment to portable devices such as mobile phones.

New Empathy IM client

Depending on your operating system distribution, you might be seeing GNOME 2.24 fairly soon, or it may be some time before it is packaged up for your system. Alternatively, check this list for distributions that are shipping 2.24 (will be updated as they do), or grab the live CD (at the time of writing, not yet updated for the new release).

[image from release notes]

In other KDE news, the KDE team have announced the release of KDE 4.1.

This is the first feature release after the initial KDE 4.0 release and is apparently designed to address many of the issues early adopters had with the 4.0 release.

You can peruse some of the improvements and new features this release contains. Much of this release is dedicated to fixing small but important issues that KDE 4.0 users wanted fixed, as well as bringing in some new applications.

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications.

I myself have recently switched over to KDE 4.0 from 3.5.9 on my desktop machine and have noticed some parts of the KDE 4 experience to be a little more edgy than the rock solid 3.x series. Hopefully, this release will address many of those problems and make KDE 4 an attractive desktop platform for all sorts of users!

The WordPress team have announced the release of WordPress 2.6, the latest version of the popular open source blogging software.

It has only been a few months since the last major version update, 2.5 was released back in March, and this release was actually pushed out ahead of schedule according to the team.

The new release of WordPress adds many new features, including:

• Post revisioning - save multiple versions of a post while you are editing, compare and roll back at any time.
• New ‘Press This’ functionality for making a blog post directly from something you find on the web.
• Support for Gears to speed up blogging on slower connections.
• A new ‘theme preview’ function, so you can test out new blog themes without committing to applying them.

Find out more and watch a video detailing the new features on the announcement blog post.

The new WordPress 2.6 release can be obtained from the official download page.