The GNOME Project has announced the immediate availability of the GNOME 2.2.1 Desktop and Developer Platform. The 2.2.x series is devoted to bugfixes, translations, and general polish.
The XPde Team released XPde 0.3.0, a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment and window manager. Check out the announcement, view the screenshots or read the detailed ChangeLog. Go to the downloads section to get the binaries and sources. Read more for a quick commentary.
The entire Source Mage GNU/Linux team would like to announce the release of their very first offical release, code named "Shillelagh". Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which the team refers to as "spells".
MadPenguin is reviewing the latest version of ArkLinux, 1.0a7. Recently, we hosted an interview with Bero, project leader of the ArkLinux distribution.
Virtual Dimension has released an English version of their Amiga + Retro-Computing 2002 show report. New products which were sold at this small fair, include AmigaOne systems running Linux, Pegasos systems running MorphOS and even a new C64 compatible Retro motherboard, called the c-one, was being presented at the fair. Regarding the AmigaOne motherboards, initial G3/G4 benchmark comparisons are now available.
MorphOS-News.de reports that Martin Heine has published some screenshots of MorphOS from CeBIT. For the first time you can now also see screenshots of Win32 Apps running on MorphOS. Bochs on MorphOS/Pegasos (G3 600) needs around 80 seconds to load Windows and around 20 seconds to start Word. Here is also a high res picture of the Pegasos machine. MorphOS-News.de also reports that it was also announced that the ProStationAudio Platinum will be included with MorphOS.
Scott Long recently posted this year's first FreeBSD status report. The document begins with a quick look at the recently released FreeBSD 5.0, then looks to the future roadmap with the 5.1 maintenance release coming within a couple of months, and the stable 5.2 release by the end of the summer. Also mentioned is the upcoming 4-STABLE release, 4.8 (24th March), which includes XFree86 4.3 and support for HyperThreading. Read the detailed report at KernelTrap.
"For a company that helped create the personal computer, it seems Microsoft wants to talk about anything these days but the PC. And for good reason. With PC sales slumping, the world's biggest software company is turning to everything from video game consoles to watches to help it maintain its status as one of the most successful technology companies ever. With about 70 percent of its revenue still coming from software for traditional computers, Microsoft's ongoing diversification push is a gamble that puts a company that has grown accustomed to a monopoly in cutthroat competition with a host of adversaries."Read the article at ajc.com.
The PCQuest magazing folks have created their own distribution, PCQ Linux 8.0, based upon Red Hat's 8.0 Linux. Read the introductory article about their distro at PCQuest.com.
With the recent beta release of Microsoft Office 2003 out the door earlier this week, many customers got their first look at what Microsoft hopes will re-write the office productivity landscape with a new ecosystem of collaborative functionality based on XML (define). But will organizations have to buy into an entirely Microsoft architecture to tap it? That's the contention of Gary Edwards, a Web app. design consultant and OpenOffice.org's representative on the OASIS OpenOffice XML Format Committee.
Robert Szeleney posted three new shots of SkyOS 3.9.6c. Impressive to see this hobby operating system getting so many new features and run impressively well, while it remains just a 1-2 man project.
Due to the recent hype surrounding LindowsOS I decided to take it out on a test-drive. And despite some bumps in the road, it all went pretty smoothly. Here is my review:
Slackware Linux 9.0 RC-3 is now available: Changelog, mirror list, direct download dir. Updates include automake 1.7.3, Nautilus 2.2.2 and Mozilla 1.3, but the qt library was kept at 3.1.1: "This was recommended by several people as an important fix for Opera, but installing it causes all kinds of display problems with KDE (particularly with fixed fonts such as the one used by Konsole). If you care more about Opera than KDE, you might want to install this, otherwise it's probably a bad idea." Update: ISO download (nightly builds) can be found here or here or here.
"UnitedLinux was designed by a group of Linux vendors to streamline their development and certification around a single Linux version. This server operating system combines technologies from each of its founding members. Released in November 2002, UnitedLinux is based on a wide variety of standards so that developers can design software that is portable across Linux platforms. UnitedLinux is a server operating system intended for Linux's primary growth areas — for enterprise and Web server applications."Read the article at TechUpdate.
This (kind of old but interesting) article gives you an overview of the Eclipse Platform, including its origin and architecture. Starting with a brief discussion about the OSS nature of Eclipse and its support for multiple programming languages, it then demonstrates the Java development environment with a simple program example. The article also surveys some of the software development tools that are available as plug-in extensions and demonstrates a plug-in extension for UML modeling. Info/shots of Linux version.
OSNews reader Alien_II sent us in the news about the release of ArkLinux 1.0-Alpha_7.1. You can read the announcement. ArkLinux uses KDE 3.1.1 (from the CVS) and kernel 2.4.21-pre5. Read more for an interview with ArkLinux's Bernhard "Bero" Rosenkraenzer and two screenshots of the latest release.
Mozilla 1.3 is released today and includes a number of new features and bug fixes. Update: On other browser news, Opera Software released Opera 7.03 for Windows and a preview release for Linux and FreeBSD. The OmniGroup released OmniWeb 4.2b2 recently as well.
A KDE developer tipped me off to a recent thread discussed in the kde-core-devel mailing list regarding interoperability between KDE and Gnome. OSNews featured an interview with the usability experts from Gnome and KDE a few days ago and we expected that the spirit of co-operation would continue to get stronger every day. Luckily this is true regarding most of these developers, but not for all of them are sharing it. Here is a commentary on the issue followed by a summary of the long thread.