Discussion around GNOME 2 began as early as 1999, following the initial release of GNOME 1, when
Federico Mena published an early draft
roadmap. Gathering from other project leaders
Miguel de Icaza and
Havoc Pennington, the roadmap roughly detailed overall goals, their dependencies, and time to completion. As early as February 2000, the GNOME Project publicly outlined a plan to have an
SDK available by the end of the calendar year. During the first
GUADEC which took place the following month, a non-authoritative GNOME 2.0
steering committee was formed, and an updated timeline was created. On February 13, 2001, the
GNOME Foundation Board of Directors met for a special meeting and discussed the launch of GNOME 2. Project co-founder Miguel de Icaza also outlined key points, including which technologies should be adopted via a public document. It was agreed that GNOME 2 should be based-on
GTK 2
widget toolkit. Spearheaded by the GNOME Human Computer Interaction team of
Sun Microsystems led by Calum Benson, a study was conducted in March 2001, to survey usability of GNOME 1.0. Following, Havoc Pennington, then published an essay titled "Free software and good user interfaces", which advocated for improvement in user interface design, and noted efforts in the upcoming GNOME 2 release. This culminated in the creation of the GNOME Usability Project, which handled publishing of an accompanying set of
human interface guidelines. This helped to standardize interface elements in the desktop environment. GNOME 2 was released on June 26, 2002 at the
Linux Symposium in
Ottawa. Starting with GNOME 2.4, a timed release cadence was adopted, which called for a new version to be released roughly every six months. This effectively resulted in new stable GNOME versions being released every September and March of any given year. This practice is still continued in the modern GNOME release cadence. ==System requirements==