"Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.12, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment." Important changes include, but are not limited to: Clearlooks set to default theme, improved file manager (Nautilus), new document viewer (Evince), and much more. The release notes are here, download information can be found here.

Confirming long-standing rumours, Apple has today announced the iTunes-enabled phone together with Motorola in a special press event. The phone will automatically pause when you get a call, explained Jobs. The ROKR can only hold about 100 songs, according to Jobs. "The way we think of this phone is, it's really an iPod shuffle on your phone," he explained. "Both devices can shuffle, both can autofill, neither has a click wheel - but the phone has a display." Meanwhile, Microsoft joins hands with Orange to challenge Apple Motorola iTunes Phone.

"Novell today announced SUSE Linux 10.0 will be available in retail and online stores in early October 2005. SUSE Linux 10.0 is uniquely designed among Linux distributions to create an easy, user-friendly experience, delivering everything that enthusiasts and home users need to get started with Linux." This release is the first to recieve input from the OpenSUSE project.

Intel, AMD, IBM and all other chipmakers are doomed. In any case, that's the case if you were to believe the claims made by the Atom Chip Corporation, "which maintains it will show off a 2TB diskless notebook based on a 6.8GHz 'quantum-optical' microprocessor at next January's Consumer Electronics Show." Pictures of the notebook and various parts are available. Whether these claims hold truth is of course under debate, "but Gendlin (creator) has his patent - and more pending, apparently - and so we look forward to seeing Atom Chip's kit in the flesh at CES."

The San Jose, Calif.-based hardware maker is expected to unveil a new generation of AMD Opteron-based servers, known by the code-name Galaxy, at an event in New York City. There, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s executives are expected to detail four new machines, along with its plans for software and services surrounding them.

MontaVista Software today announced the release of version 4.0 of its embedded Linux OS, MontaVista Linux Professional Edition. The new release is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel and includes hard real-time capabilities.

This opinion piece gives 8 reasons as to why HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is in its stone age. It talks of screen corners, visual attention, the spatial paradigm (oh my...) and much more.

"Okay, I’ve had an opinion change I’d like to announce. I’m betting that the future of mobility will be Linux, and not Symbian, Windows or anything else. This is quite a change from my previous pro-Symbian stances, but I’ve been sort of leaning this way for a while - or rather, leaning away from Symbian as it fails to live up to its potential - and now I’ve finally come to a religious change of faith when it comes to mobile OSes."

RISC OS has recently benefitted from a number of projects to improve its graphics capabilities including, most recently, 3D acceleration. And as more development occurs for multi-display support, Drobe asks the question whether this is the widest RISC OS desktop yet. But more interesting is the insight into the RISC OS world that this view of the desktop provides.

Here is a very long and comprehensive comparison of archiving tools for Microsoft Windows. Three awards are rewarded for best commercial, best freeware, and best open-source archiver.

OSNews takes a look at some inexpensive "Virtual Reality" monitor specs. You wear them like a pair of glasses, and your eye sees the equivalent of a relatively large monitor. It's been a science fiction dream for years, and now it's available for under $200 at Geeks.com, albeit in rudimentary form. So how do they work in real life? Read more to find out.

"Colony CD 4 is ready. This is the fourth in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Breezy development cycle, as images that are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Breezy. You can download it here." Bug reports can be filed here.

On 2nd September 2005 Sun announced the retirement of the Sun Industry Standard Source License. As a consequence, no future Sun open-source project will use the SISSL. Projects currently using the SISSL under a dual-license scheme, such as OpenOffice.org, are dropping the SISSL and thus simplifying their license scheme as soon as the development cycle allows. Effectie with the announcement that Sun is retiring the SISSL, OpenOffice.org will in the future only be licensed under the LGPL (.pdf). A FAQ is also available.

Open Virtuozzo (GPL/QPL) is an operating system-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. Open Virtuozzo creates isolated, secure virtual private servers or virtual environments on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VPS performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VPSs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.