"After a very productive series of preview releases, Openbox 3.4 is here! If you haven't yet, we'd really like to recommend that you read through the 'Upgrading to 3.4 guide', which is on the Openbox web site, here. The number of changes since 3.3.1, as you'll know if you've been following the preview releases, can be a little overwhelming. The upgrading to 3.4 guide talks about most of them, along with pretty pictures to show many of the new features."

The European Union's second highest court is expected to rule on Sept. 17 whether the European Commission was right in 2004 to find that Microsoft violated antitrust laws, sources familiar with the matter said. Sept. 17 is the final working day before the retirement of Court of First Instance President Bo Vesterdorf, who is presiding over the landmark case. The ruling is expected to clarify whether the European Commission can continue to pursue the case, or whether it must pull back and permit Microsoft to continue its business practices.

Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos said his company's technical and marketing agreement with Microsoft will help increase Linux adoption rates because users will have access to improved technology and won't have to fear lawsuits from Redmond. "What's good for adoption rates is good for Linux," Typaldos said in an interview.

"Netscape is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Netscape Navigator 9.0 Beta 1. The release is now available for download from browser.netscape.com for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some of Navigator 9's new features are listed here; for a complete list, see What's New in Netscape Navigator 9? at browser.netscape.com."

After several technical previews and betas, Trolltech has launched Qt Jambi (Qt for Java) as a product under a dual licensing model (commercial and GPL license). There are also some product information and demos, and downloads for open source versions.

Times change. When the movies came about people said that it was a trend that will die soon. When the TV came out, even more people said that it won't catch on. And here we are again, at the dawn of IPTV, finding the first professionally-made, web-only, live action series: Sanctuary. Co-created by one of Sci-Fi Channel's Stargate SG-1 producers, Stage3Media's Damian Kindler was very kind to answer some of our questions about the promising project, which recently even hit a Guinness record as the most expensive web-only production ever ($4.5 million CDN). You can view behind-the-scenes and previews here and the first full 17-minute webisode here (includes a cameo of Stargate: Atlantis' own David Hewlett), while you can support the project by buying the HD DRM-free version of the webisodes at the official site. Read more in our interview inside!

The first alpha release of the native version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (no X11 needed) has been released. "This is an alpha test version so that developers and users can find out what works and not, and make comments on how to improve it. There are a number of things that do not work in this version."

Asus and Intel have teamed up to develop a USD 199 notebook PC, the companies announced here on June 5. In a keynote address given by Sean Maloney, an executive vice president at Intel and chief marketing and sales officer, Jonney Shih, chairman and chief executive of Asus, was invited on stage to unveil the 'Eee PC', an inexpensive laptop designed to help spread computing to poorer regions. Two models were demonstrated: a USD 199 and USD 299 model. They represent part of what Intel is now calling its 'World Ahead', market initiative, giving virtually anyone around the world a chance to own a PC. In addition, Intel has announced major updates for its C++ and Fortran tools.

"After fifteen months of hard work, the Camino Project is pleased to announce the release of Camino 1.5, a substantial update to the popular Camino 1.0 web browser. Based on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine, Camino 1.5 includes some brand-new, exciting features to make surfing the web even easier." New features include inline spell-checking, feed detection, session saving, and tabbed browsing improvements. Camino is a fantastic OS X native browser that is generally more compatible than Safari. The Camino Project also launched a new website to coincide with their browser milestone.

FreeSoftwareMagazine takes a look at Debian as a desktop system, and they conclude: "I feel that Debian Etch is as good on the desktop as it is on the server. It has a long rich history, a strong community, is amazingly stable and is a great fit for both my servers and my laptop. I urge everyone to give it a go on the desktop."

Apple updated its online stores today and released updated MacBook Pros with speed, storage, ram and graphics improvements. The 15 inch models also benefit from a LED backlit display while the 17 inch adds higher resolution display option.

As a BeOS zealot (yes, that is the only zealotry you can accuse me of), I had a big smile on my face when I read Daniel Sandler's latest blog entry. "As I am no doubt the last person to point out, Google Maps has added a street level view to (a few) urban areas. It's the first Google app (besides Picasa) that I'm aware of that requires Flash, but it's also the first Google app to feature the Be Man. I guess it was only a matter of time, given that there are so many Be alums at Google now. I figured I'd send him home after all this time away." Thanks to SheepLover.com IsComputerOn.com for pointing this out. Instant update: He lives!

DistroWatch reviews Fedora 7, and concludes: "While Fedora doesn't seem to have made great advances in the ease of configuring those finer things in life (like non-GPL drivers and non-free codecs), it's not overly complicated if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty. Once you start needing to customise the machine outside of standard Fedora boundaries though, things can become a little less reliable."

On June 2nd 2007, a new version of GNU Emacs has been released. Emacs version 22 includes GTK+ toolkit support, enhanced mouse support, a new keyboard macro system, improved Unicode support, drag-and-drop operation on X, as well as many new modes and packages including a graphical user interface to GDB, Python mode, the mathematical tool Calc, the remote file editing system Tramp, and more.