GNOME 2.14 released

GNOME developers released on Thursday version 2.14 of the desktop environment for Linux and Unix, including a new application suite aimed at making it easier to use the open-source desktop in enterprises.

"As of GNOME 2.14, the GNOME Project now includes an Administration Suite, which is a collection of tools that are aimed squarely at systems administrators," said the project team.

"The two new tools that form the beginnings of this suite are incredibly powerful and should help administrators in both large corporate deployments and situations where machine lockdown is required," the team said.

The two new tools are Pessulus, an editor to lock down PC functionality, and Sabayon, a profile manager.

"Pessulus is a lockdown editor that allows administrators to easily disable certain features of the GNOME desktop, as may be desired in corporate environments and Internet cafes. While lockdown features have now been available in GNOME for many years, Pessulus makes it far easier for administrators to perform these tasks," the release notes claimed.

The features that can be disabled include command-line access, the ability to shut down or reboot the machine and access to specific protocols in the Web browser.

Other features in GNOME 2.14 include performance enhancements and improvements to Ekiga, its voice and video-over-IP client.

More details on the 2.14 release can be found here.

Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reported from London.