Gnome Desktop Environment 2.8 was released today, on schedule. Including a slew of new features and the much anticipated Evolution 2.0, Gnome 2.8 achieves several milestones. Release notes can be found here, and a number of screenshots here. In other Gnome news, a new Gnome news site, gnomejournal.org, was announced today.

The ZFS, breakthrough file system in Solaris 10, delivers virtually unlimited capacity, provable data integrity, and near-zero administration.

With pro features like 16-bit per channel support, camera RAW and the healing brush, Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 3.0 today. Digital photo users in particular now have the choice of this powerful application that has little competition in its range, be it the free Gimp or the similarly priced PaintShopPro. Picture Window Pro is the only photo application that can outfeature Elements (and depending on the case, even Photoshop itself sometimes). Picture Window Pro is one of the favorite applications of photography professionals and it's at the same price range as Elements, 90 USD.

An upgraded GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix is due for release this Wednesday, with its authors pitching enhanced features for end-users and a commitment to make hardware "just work".

Amidst pressure from several avenues, Microsoft was forced to cut features from its new Windows emulation software in order to deliver G5 compatibility without further delays.

With Open Directory your application can locate and manage information about users and other resources in your existing network infrastructure. Read this article to learn how to write Open Directory plug-ins that take advantage of this capability.

Apple is holding their European Expo and nowadays being a Mac owner thought I'd go along. If Apple has such a pitiful market share then you'd expect it to be a small show with little software and few visitors. Er No, this was the complete opposite. Pictures of the Expo included.

Microsoft published a patch for a major security flaw in its software's handling of the JPEG graphics format and urged customers to use a new tool to locate the many applications that are vulnerable. Users who have installed SP2 are not vulnerable to the flaw.

ReactOS 0.2.4 has been released, and is downloadable from sourceforge.

A new "tour" is available at the SkyOS homepage, showing off what will be available in SkyOS 5.0. Included are many screenshots. This is a good summary of everything that has been done with SkyOS over the past year. In other news Developer Studio, GCC 3.4.0, Binutils 2.15, Make, Python, Autoconf, and many other development tools are new available for SkyOS, as well as Blender3D. The SkyOS community has been busy as well, developing such applications as Personal Organizer (e-mail client/organizer), SkIRC, AFTP, and a few others.

When Novell's Linux desktop arrives at the end of this year it will be stripped down to avoid integration problems and to keep it simple for users. The desktop combines functionality from Ximian and SuSE Linux, both acquired by Novell last year. Nat Friedman, Novell vice president of R&D for desktop development, told vnunet.com that this was what enterprise customers wanted.

Finally, the much anticipated version 1.0 of Firefox are out on its first preview. Read more from here and proceed to download. Also, new versions of Mozilla suite, Thunderbird were posted. Here's another article too: How to migrate from Ximian Evolution to Mozilla Thunderbird.

The Contiki operating system is a multi-tasking operating system with full TCP/IP support. Contiki is designed for memory contrained devices ranging from tiny 8-bit embedded microcontrollers to old 8-bit homecomputers like the Commodore 64. Here is a screenshot of Contiki rendering the mobile/text-mode version of OSNews (double sized, C64 only does 320x200 in this mode).

It has not been announced on Linare.com, but it appears that Linare Linux 2.0 has been uploaded to Ibiblio.org and its mirrors, and is available for free download. We will post a review of Linare PRO soon.