"Since the test was officially announced recently, our core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly."

It is that time of year again: a new Ubuntu release is upon us. The beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 was released a few days ago, so I decided to give it a try and see what new features and improvements they have shoved into this one. As always, this is as much a preview of the latest GNOME release (2.22) as it is of Ubuntu itself. Read on for the preview.

"So how is Oracle doing with its Oracle Unbreakable Linux? Pretty well. According to Monica Kumar, senior director Linux and open source product marketing at Oracle, there are now 2000 customers for Oracle's Linux. Those customers will now be getting a bonus from Oracle: free clustering software."

I have no idea how I missed it (seriously) but read this: "It's been almost one year since we announced our conversations with ACCESS Co. Ltd. targeted at releasing legacy BeOS related documents, and today last week we were happy to inform the community that this project has finally arrived to a happy conclusion: the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters are now available online. As an emerging open source project, documentation for Haiku is still hard to come by; and while our Documentation Team works on creating Haiku-specific material, the BeBook and the Be Newsletters will provide valuable reference material for all developers, new and experienced alike."

The beta version of Fedora 9 has been released. It comes with GNOME 2.22, KDE 4.0.2, Firefox 3.0 beta 5, PackageKit, Kernel 2.6.25-rc5, and much more. "The Beta release is the point at which we really want and need the wider community's help with testing. Beta is a point of much greater stability in Fedora's development branch, but some fixes continue to occur to improve usability, performance, and stability."

"While pundits have been lamenting the fact that Apple's 'software update' program on Windows is now pushing Safari 3.1 to users, we thought we'd check out Safari 3.1 to find out if Apple has made any real progress on the Windows version of this browser. After all, it's about the software, right? We put the Safari 3 beta on Windows through the wringer last summer, and we weren't too terribly impressed. The problems were significant, such that we'd have a hard time recommending the browser to any Windows user. As of last summer, Firefox was still the Windows browser of choice here at Ars. Have things improved for Safari? Wow, have they."

"When asked what they most like about RISC OS, many enthusiasts are likely to mention the fluid, slick and intuitive manner with which user and computer interact. In other words, the graphical user interface, or the GUI as the geeks would have us call it. With RISC OS, the GUI encourages all applications to work in a similar way, and to have the same feel. Faced with new RISC OS software, a user already has a good idea of how to drive it and explore."

"We often hear from readers who want to track the development process of their favorite Linux distribution but don't know where to start. Budding Linux enthusiasts frequently ask how the release cycles work, what the version numbers mean, and what options are available for end-user testing prior to official releases. The answers to those questions differ depending on the distribution, but we are going to attempt to address those questions for Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE - three of the most prominent desktop Linux distributions. We will also provide a brief visual comparison of upcoming versions with screenshots of the prereleases."

"When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most 'modular' yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS. A singular yet highly modular OS could give Microsoft the best of all possible worlds: OSes that can be highly customized for deployment but developed monolithically. One modular OS to rule them all, let's say."

Awesome 2.2 has been released. "Awesome is a floating and tiling window manager initialy based on a dwm code rewriting. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and awesome. Windows can be managed in several layouts: tiled, maximized, dwindle, spiral, floating... Each layout can be applied on the fly, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. Managing windows in tiled mode assures that no space will be wasted on your screen. No gaps, no overlap. Other layouts can be used for different purpose. If you do not want to use the tiling management, you can use the floating layout wich will let you organize your windows as you wish, like any other window manager."

"This is the first Haiku alpha 1 status update. The goal of this status update is to provide information on how the project is going. There has recently been an consensus that it was about time to start preparing a first alpha for a myriad of reasons. To me personally, the fact that it is about time to show off the enormous amount of work that has been put in the project the past number of years. Another good reason - in my opinion - is to get everyone behind one goal: preparing the code for a first release. So what's the goal of this status update? Well, with a large number of developers actually working on the different components of the operating system, it is easy to lose track of what is going on. You can consider this a news update."

"There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners. But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company. "It's funny - even if I write a generally positive piece about Apple, I still get more complaints from Apple partisans" than from opponents, Mossberg says. He has even coined a term for the effect. "I call it the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation."

A new version of Mozilla's popular Firefox Web browser is ready for download with improved security and memory use as the tiny company takes a stab at Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer. The program's creators told Reuters on Thursday that the privately-held company's trial version of Firefox 3 browser is ready for the masses to use after months of development.

"I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I'd faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it's hard for me to give it up?"