The Xfce project just announced the first maintenance release of the Xfce 4.4 branch, Xfce 4.4.1. There is a changelog, and you can download it from the Sourceforge download page. In case you lived under a rock the past few years: "Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use."

A new development in the Zeta legality issue: BeOSFrance says to have written confirmation from Jean-Louis Gassee that to JLG's knowledge, YellowTAB did not have an agreement with Palmsource . My French isn't exactly what it should be (I should've paid more attention during high school), but with the help of Adam and others we managed to translate the most important bit: "The impropriety and absence of an agreement between yellowTAB and PalmSource (at the time, still the owner of the BeOS IP) had been confirmed to me in writing by the person best-placed to talk about it in those circumstances: Jean-Louis Gassee."

As reported by Slashdot, debate has risen over ClearType in Linux. OpenSUSE recently disabled this technology, saying "that this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents and should not be activated in any default build of the library". Other websites have picked up on this as well: "The strange thing is though: no matter the fact that Novell and Microsoft are now buddies, openSUSE still has to be concerned about the ClearType patents!"

"With Etch you get the best package manager around in APT, a rock solid stable system, and the ability to tinker with the desktop all that you want - without having the procedure become too arcane. If you are familiar with Linux then I would strongly recommend you try out Debian Etch - just an awesome release by the Debian group."

TriedIT reviews CRUX 2.3, and concludes: "CRUX 2.3 is simple, but not from a user standpoint. It does require a lot of manual installation and configuration. It also doesn’t come with a bunch of pre-installed software either. But the distribution is meant for experienced users, after all. It is definitely simple from a system standpoint, however. There's no complex hardware auto-detection, or heavy weight desktop environments, 3D desktops or proprietary video card drivers. The package system is also pretty simple, but includes source-based package installation. There are no fancy GUI configuration utilities (or even console-based ones)."

"Sunrise Browser is an open source Web browser for Mac OS X intended for use as a Web developer's tool. It is not a groundbreaking achievement in that regard, but it is worth checking out due to its innovative and often unusual user interface choices."

Palm is finally getting ready to land its users onto a modern Palm-built OS. Ed Colligan, in his Investor Day keynote today, announced that Palm will be launching a homegrown Linux-based OS by the end of the year, with Opera for a browser and the recently acquired Chattermail for messaging.

"Back in my university days, when Netscape was the latest web browser on the scene and the Pentium MMX was the power user's processor of choice, UNIX was part of my everyday life. Since graduating, my chosen desktop operating system has been Windows of some variety. This is partly because it was the most readily available consumer desktop operating system and also because it served me well for the most part." More here. In other Ubuntu news, Automatix2 for Feisty is released.

"Sony has recently updated their VAIO UX Micro PC line with the UX390N series. This little beast packs the power of a full blown Microsoft Windows Vista computer into a form factor of only 5.91"x3.74"x1.27"x1.50". When you first look at palm sized portable device you may guess it to be a souped up version of the Sony PSP, but if you take a look at the USD 2449.99 sticker price, you will probably guess it does a whole lot more. And that it does."

"On UNIX systems, each system and end-user task is contained within a process. The system creates new processes all the time and processes die when a task finishes or something unexpected happens. Here, learn how to control processes and use a number of commands to peer into your system."

"The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB. Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages." Update: Debian 3.1r6 has also been released. Update II: Screenshots, and how to upgrade to it.

DesktopBSD 1.6-RC2 has been released. "Primary changes since 1.6-RC1: improved video detection; no more annoying package database messages when an installation/upgrade failed; upgrading from 1.0 should work fine now; cups problems are hopefully gone; KDE 3.5.6; K3B 1.0."

"After several weeks of discussion the leaders of Compiz and Beryl have agreed that the two communities shall reunite. This decision is supported by both David and Quinn and represents the majority decision of the administrators and developers in each community."

Kimmo Kinnunen wrote yesterday on the GTK+-WebCore developer mailing list that he has imported the Safari 2.0 WebCore branch into GTK+-WebCore. "This means that from the webcore/javascriptcore part, the code is mostly the same as in current Safari. So if there are any crashes, they're not from webcore/javascriptcore part of the codebase with very high probability, rather my code."