"IMD for Linux (Indigo Magic Desktop) is going much further that those themes that simulate the IRIX look and feel. IMD for Linux has it own window manager that looks, behaves and provides the same features found on an IRIX box. Read more about the recreation of 4dwm desktop environment on Linux and how to beta test for the project.

GNOME 2.0 Desktop, the user environment for the Solaris OE, is now ready for production use. It has been built by Sun Microsystems and is fully supported. Additionally, Sun went beta with Star Office 6.1.

eComStation OS/2 1.1-RC1 R5 is now available for subscribers and selected beta testers to be downloaded from the site's ftp server. There is at least one more RC to be expected before final release.

The Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition Platform SDK contains the information you need to develop applications for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. The Tablet PC platform encompasses Windows XP and its extensions that enable input and output of handwriting and speech data on a Tablet PC as well as interchange of this data with other computers.

An insider at Sun says there's frantic discussion inside the company about big problems with the Java platform that, he claimed, "prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun". He said: "It strikes me as hypocritical for Sun to blame Microsoft for any failure of the Java platform when Sun's own engineers find developing common software applications in Java impractical". One of the problems, he claimed, is that while Java has a lot of benefits compared to C and C++, its implementation on Solaris makes it difficult to deliver reliable applications. The Inquirer has the scoop.

Omni Group is well known to most Mac users and NeXT ones back in the day. Omni Group today is a MacOSX-only company, writting high quality applications in Cocoa, apps like OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and 3D game ports. Today, we talked to its CEO, Ken Case, about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari and the future.

Responding to the overwhelming interest in Desktop Linux, representatives from key firms and organizations today announced the formation of the Desktop Linux Consortium, or DLC. The vendor-neutral association will promote interests and raise awareness of the emerging role and benefits offered by GNU/Linux on the desktop. Consortium members comprise both commercial companies and open source organizations that are developing and shaping the technology that will speed the adoption rate of Linux to the desktop.

"After three years in the making the FreeBSD Release 5.0 operating system has been made available to the general public. Released towards the end of January, the OS provides first-time support for Sun's Sparc64 and Intel's IA64 platforms. And while some effort has been put into AMD's Hammer architecture, there is presently no usable support for the 64-bit mode of Hammer, said FreeBSD engineer, Scott Long." Read the article at LinuxWorld.

"In this release SuSE has worked hard to create a version of their Linux distro that runs MS Office applications, and that is also generally more geared toward ordinary desktop users. This release is based on SuSE 8.1, but contains key additional desktop applications including StarOffice 6.0, and Codeweaver's CrossOver Office products that let Linux users run Windows programs, albeit older Office 2000 and Office 97 apps, not Office XP." Read the review at ExtremeTech.

Although GNU-Darwin can be viewed as a standalone OS for x86 and PowerPC architectures, it is also a source of free software to Apple users.

As we already mentioned yesterday, now from MacMinute: "Apple today announced a new Spring line of iMacs, a new 17-inch widescreen model featuring a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processor and 133 MHz system bus; 256MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) memory; a faster 4x SuperDrive for playing and burning CDs and DVDs; and internal support for AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth, for US$1,799. The new 15-inch flat panel model features an 800 MHz G4 processor and is now priced at $1,299. Apple also announced lower pricing on its line of eMac computers, dropping the prices to $999 and $1,299."

An effort has been started for closer cooperation between the KDE and GNOME usability teams. Additionally, you can read this long article about the corporate KDE. Also, several companies have joined to launch a consortium to promote Linux for desktop computers. The consortium's goal will be to raise awareness of desktop Linux and to speed its adoption, the organization plans to announce today.

I have been a big fan of BeOS since the Creative Labs OS Championship Team dumped it on me in 1999. At the time I was working technical support in Dublin and they had some guy looking after support for BeOS who really could not care less. He had never even installed it! I was deputy Linux champion and generally considered interested in OSes so they said "Hey, Stevo! Wanna be a champ? All you need to do is get this OS installed and play with it a bit." So, needless to say, I did and I was hooked.

Bug-fix version 2.2.1 of the GTK+ widget toolkit and associated librares (GLib, Pango) is now available.

This is the final maintenance release for the Qt 3.0 branch (the most recent, actively developed version is 3.1). For detailed information please consult the changelog.