The long-awaited second major version of the GNOME desktop is days away from a fifth beta and on schedule for a full release on the first day of summer, according to its release manager. I'm quite sure we're going to make it, given that our UI and string freeze has just kicked in, and the number of 2.0.0 bugs we have left to go," says Jeff Waugh, who is ramrodding the release. According to the release schedule, Beta 5 will be issued at the end of this week. It is to be followed by a release candidate, which developers hope to make public June 7. If all goes well, GNOME-2.0 will be released two weeks later. View new features, further info, screen shots and much more, by hitting the read more link.

GNOME2 comes more than three years after the March 1999 release of GNOME-1.0. The initial offering was welcomed by free software purists who objected to the licensing policies of Trolltech, publishers of the Qt toolkit on which the rival KDE desktop is based. (Those objections were reduced when Trolltech adopted the GPL for its X11 version when used to produce GPLed software.) But the first GNOME suffered from instability problems and was the subject of considerable criticism. This lingered through the May 2000 release of GNOME 1.2, but had largely disappeared by April 2001's GNOME 1.4. News Source: Linux and Main
Direct Link: GNOME2 on track for June release
Home Site: Gnome Official Site
Whats New: Gnome 2 New Features
Dev Schedule: Release Schedule
Screen Shots: View Here