New in 8.4.4: This is a major bugfixes release.
  The color mosaic activity crashes when a target button is clicked.

New in 8.4.3: This is a minor bugfixes release.
  Fixed many potential crash of GCompris in the key_press activity callback.
  Fixed fallback directory for english locale
  Ed Montgomery created the canada region map for the geography country activity.
  Voices: Now package voices files above 10, they are used by the algebra activity. Thanks Mariusz for noticing this.
  Chess: The left lower corner square (a1 in algebraic notation) is now in the dark color

Translations:
  Anand Kulkarni added support for Urdu including voices.
  Added bulgarian voices made by Iassen Kertov

Since version 8.4, Gcompris switched to gstreamer as sound output system. Until version 0.10.15 of gstreamer-plugins-base, there was a bug when playing short vorbis encoded files.

Unfortunately, most distributions of the end of 2007 shipped with a previous version of gstreamer-plugins-base, making all Gcompris activities based on sounds of letters and numbers unusable.

If you suffer from this problem, you can either convert vorbis files in alphabet directories to wav, keeping the .ogg extension, or ask for an update of gstreamer-plugins-base to your distribution team.

As of Mandriva 2008.0, you can grab the needed files here . You will normally only need the folling one on a standard system :

  gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-0.10.15-2mdv2008.0.i586.rpm

Changes from 8.3.3:

  Fixed a major crash in the falling word activity.
  Added Breton support (from trunk) by Alan Monfort and Victoire (voices).
  Added brazil map in geography country by Elisa de Castro Guerra
  In chronos, fixed missing translation by Ronny Standtke
  In shape type activity (puzzles), fixed a bad offset making the placement fuzzy.

Major strucural changes, packagers please take care:
  sdl_mixer replaced by gstreamer.
  Switched GCompris to GPL V3 and Later.
  Now all voices are in a separated svn module.
  The voices must now be put under boards/voices/ instead of boards/sounds/
  To get the voices installed in the proper place, simply run: make update-voices
  Re-encoded voices in a lower bitrate, saving 40MB on the tarball
  Internal static gnomecanvas and libart

Bugs fixed:
  Fixed "-l list" option to load the menu list from the base. Option was not working when boards are compiled statically.
  Now we don’t crash if we cannot find a single image at startup.
  Fixed a major bug, target activity is broken, the target never reach it’s goal.
  Moved the lock file checking downstairs in the startup sequence to avoid for exemple ’gcompris -v’ to being locked.
  missingletter: GCompris was asserting when you click on the target image
  Chronos activity: removed hardcoded translations
  doubleentry: fixed call to audio voices.
  algorithm: Fixed the skip of a level after the call to the help.
  shapegame:

• Fixed bad reference to hand image to catch small icon
• fixed, it was missing a X offset coming from the box of shapes on the left. It was mostly visible in the doubleentry activity where it was not easy to spot the target.
• use the larger button for the tooltip (country name too large)
• Translated The Text In Tooltip Were Invalid.
• Removed text shadow as it isn’t always cute depending on the fonts.

  memory: space sound 2 was twice in the list. If they were both selected in the game, the children was proposed the same sound in 4 spot making the game bugged.
  login: fixed a little bug, in text entry mode it was not displayed again if you open/close the help.
  Fixed falling words for arabic
  The click on letter activity was only proposing the first 4 letters of the alphabet, whatever the level.
  Fixed running on machines which have / use prefix/lib64 instead of prefix/lib
  Fixed concerns releated to the fullscreen mode
  Fixed the gnuchess search path to accept gnome-gnuchess
  Major fix, GCompris was crashing if you clicked during bonus display

New translation:
  Added Afrikaans support by Samuel Murray.

Updated translation:
  af Samuel Murray
  ar Khaled Hosny
  ar_TN Makni Bassem
  bg Yavor Doganov
  ca Xavier A. Conde Rueda
  da Mogens Jaeger
  de Ronny Standtke
  dz Tshewang Norbu
  el Yannis Kaskamanidis
  en_GB David Lodge
  es Jorge González
  eu Iñaki Larrañaga Murgoitio
  fr Stéphane Raimbault
  hi Bruno Coudoin
  id Umar Said
  it Immacolata Arenga
  mr Anand Kulkarni
  nb Klaus Ade Johnstad
  nl Reinout van Schouwen
  nn Karl Ove Hufthammer
  oc Yannig Marchegay
  pt_BR Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes
  pt Jose Jorge
  sr@Latn Slobodan Simić
  sr Слободан Симић
  sv Daniel Nylander
  th Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
  vi Clytie Siddall
  zh_CN Pengyong Su

New voices:
  Added Serbian sounds by Mihailo and Slobodan Simic.
  New Serbian voices by Mihailo and Slobodan

Major bugs have been found in GCompris 8.3.2 especially for Windows users but not only. We encourage you to upgrade to the new 8.3.3 release.

The Changelog is:
  GCompris was asserting when you click on the target image in missingletter activity.
  GCompris was unstable in Spanish and in any locale where we don’t have spoken congratulation (bug#463961).
  Even if we have them, audio congratulation were not played on Windows.

Jozef Cerven from Slovakia has send us a major contribution. He made a new activity "Writing Tutor - Computer helps children learn to write". The concept is to help the writing by using a graphic tablet.

You can read the whole story in our wiki while the code is being integrated. It will be available in next GCompris version.

Finally, it’s time to make a new release, we really have a lot of new feature that we are happy to share with you.

Your bug reports are welcome. GCompris is huge and we cannot run all the activities, it means there maybe obvious bugs like missing image in a certain activity but we are not aware of it, that why we need your feedback.

What’s new in 8.3:

  New click and draw and draw number activities by Olivier Ponchaut.
  New word processor activity (Bruno)
  Shapes type activities have been reworked by Miguel.
  By Miguel DE IZARRA, added a 2 player mode in connect4.
  Imported sounds from Tuxpaint. Many activities have now many audio effects taken from Tuxpaint.
  New activity by Miguel which replaces the scale activity by a dedicated one (instead of being shape game based).
  Created a new activity, a mini local chat based on multicast. It does not require a server. It does not work on Internet.
  Submarine: reworked this activity to include a goal (a gate on the right and a treasure to catch to open the gate)
  Added a minimal module in the admin to display the log. The module allow to filter by user, sort all columns and reset the log.
  Splitted geography and geography_country
  New top level icons set and bonus from Mathieu Ignacio.
  searace: does instant rotation now. improved the parameters to make it more realistic. Now a straight line won’t win all time.
  Fixed skin selection
  Added support for no double instance run. Now by default GCompris won’t run again if started less than 30 seconds after a previous one. This can be disable with —nolockcheck
  The Windows version now includes the administration module.

Voices:
  New Indonesian voices by Dessy Widyasar
  New norwegian voices by Johnstad/Gabor
  New Arabic (Tunisia) voices by Makni Bassem
  Added Norwegian sounds by Johnstad/Gabor

Translation:
  Added Dzongkha Translation by Pema Geyleg
  Added Indonesian words by Umar Said
  Added Korean Translation by Abigail Brady, Bastien Nocera, Gareth Owen
  Added Occitan by Yannig MARCHEGAY
  Added Tamil Translation by I. Felix by Yair Hershkovitz
  Updated Arabic by Djihed Afifi
  Updated Brasilian Portuguese by Frederico Gonçalves Guimarães
  Updated Croatian translatio by Robert Sedak
  Updated Dutch by Vincent van Adrighem
  Updated English (British) translatio by David Lodge
  Updated Estonian translation by Olle Niit by Priit Laes
  Updated French by Claude Paroz and Jean-Pierre Ayanides
  Updated Galician by Ignacio Casal Quinteiro
  Updated German translation by Ronny Standtke
  Updated Hebrew translation by Itzik Bereby by Yair Hershkovitz
  Updated Hebrew translation by Itzik Bereby.
  Updated Indonesian translation by Umar Said
  Updated Italian translation by Alessio Frusciante
  Updated Norwegian Nynorsk by Karl Ove Hufthammer
  Updated Norwegian Bokmål by Klaus Ade Johnstad
  Updated Portuguese by José Jorge
  Updated Slovak translation by Marek Nagy
  Updated Spanish translation by Francisco Javier F. Serrador

A.J. Venter from OpenLab in Namibia let us know about a nice comic showing GCompris in action.

If you want to know more on the major progress done in installing schools and Internet public access point in Namibia, have a look to this interview of A.J. Venter by Ofset.

A.J Venter is also the author of TappyTux, an educational free software dedicated to children.

The release 7.2 includes 4 new activities:
  Tangram: by Yves, from the original gtans code made by Philippe Banwarth
  Mosaic: by Bruno, Rebuild the same mosaic on the right area
  Guess a number: by Bruno, Tux hides a number that you must discover
  Audio memory: by Yves, the hidden card memory but with sounds.