The Beryl project has often been criticised as being nothing more than eyecandy for the sake of eyecandy. However, there are numerous features in Beryl which could improve usability and workflow. In this series of three articles, some of the new usability features in Beryl 0.2.0 are highlighted and explained (article I, article II, and article III).

"GoboLinux is a unique distribution in many ways. It's built from scratch following the Linux From Scratch procedure and uses custom boot scripts, personalized directory structure, and a simple yet comprehensive source-based dependency-resolving package management system. GoboLinux is perhaps best known for its alternate filesystem hierarchy. Unlike Linux's traditional Filesystem hierarchy, where a program has bits and pieces scattered in several places like /etc, /usr/bin, and /usr/share, each program gets its own directory tree under GoboLinux."

GNOME 2.17.91 has been released, which is the second beta en route to GNOME 2.18, planned for a release in March this year. See the GNOME 2.17 page on the GNOME wiki for more details on the release schedule.

Novell will continue its march against Microsoft and any uptake of Vista despite a recent alliance with the software giant. "We're excited by the muted reaction to Vista," Ron Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO, told the media at a breakfast meeting in Sydney today. "We're going to attack vigorously and go after their footprint as much as we can," Hovsepian said.

El Reg has reveiwed Windows Vista. "So, there's our first look at Vista. It does benefit from a lot of good ideas, many of them Apple's, of course, but good nevertheless. It simply doesn't work very well, unfortunately. There are serious problems with execution; it's not polished; it's not ready. It should not be on the market, and certainly not for the outrageous prices being charged. Don't buy it, at least until after the first service pack is out. Don't pay to be a beta tester." Elsewhere, analysts believe Windows Vista will take a bite out of Mac's market share.

"Focusing again on applications this week, specifically I'll look at two of the promising document viewers for KDE 4, Okular and Ligature. They are two of the rising stars of KDE 4, but they both have their roots as KDE 3 applications that have grown up."

Originally Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 was slated for late December release, but after a few delays, they have announced the impending release of YDL 5.0 for Power Macs. YDL v5.0 has been available for the Sony PlayStation 3 since November, but here is the Mac delivery schedule: install and source ISOs available for download via YDL.net Enhanced accounts at the end of February 2007. Two weeks later, DVDs will ship from the Terra Soft Store. Two weeks after that, you can download install and source ISOs via the public mirrors.

DevLoop has just published a free paper (US mirror) benchmarking some popular database systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, DB2, Informix, Sybase SQL Anywhere, on Linux using JDBC. The focus here is on non-real setups where we can analyze the individual aspects that might affect system performance. The code is available (GPL) so that anyone can reproduce the results.

"Yesterday was our big day at Google, and we can say with a good degree of confidence that the Haiku Tech Talk was quite successful. We had a very special guest for this event: former Be Inc. CEO Jean Louis Gassée, not only joined us at Google for our presentation, but also gave a few words of support and encouragement for our project. It was great to have JLG's presence, as well as that of the several ex-Be engineers who showed up for the talk. We were also glad to see JAVA for BeOS developer Andrew Bachman join us for this special event. Take a look at the pictures from the presentation."

"The following photographs were taken at the 3GSM World Congress 2007 show in Barcelona. The Access Linux Platform is the new Linux based mobile platform from Access (PalmSource), seen as the successor to Palm OS (Garnet)."

"Klik is unique among software installation systems for Linux, in that each package installed through klik is self-contained, isolated from the rest of the operating system. Klik isn't a package management system; rather it's an application that lets you download and run software without installing it."

"Quartz Composer is a visual development tool that can turn most any data into amazing, live-action graphics and animations, using a programming model that is easy to understand and work with. This article shows you how to use the stunning graphics abilities of Quartz Composer along with the easy development of Dashboard to create fun, beautiful widgets that attract attention and display information with rich visual content."

"The Ubuntu Technical Board has made two technical decisions of which we would like to inform the Ubuntu community. Both of these decisions concern the upcoming 7.04 release of Ubuntu, scheduled for mid-April." Ubuntu 7.04 will not activate binary video drivers by default, essentially meaning nothing will change from the previous releases. The second change is a major blow to the PowerPC architecture and thus owners of Apple PPC hardware: "The PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community team." Translation: Ubuntu PPC can shake hands with the dodo.

Another Patch Tuesday and Microsoft comes out with a variety of patches, and this series is more critical than a month ago. The critical vulnerabilities are in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Antivirus. All of them could allow remote code execution.