Many things are springing up @Themes.org. We have a new icons page at: icons.themes.org as well as a new Guest Tiler. e.themes.org also now has the tag "Official Enlightenment Themes page". -- Stay tuned for an announcement about [/. - fm - t.o] from Rob RSN.

You knew it was coming, but not you know what it is. Raster has taken all his experience from Enlightenment, and hacked GTK to themable. Once the bugs are ironed out, all Gnome applications will be able to be customized to whatever bizarre extremes the user desires. The RHAD Themes Page has been updated with a gigantic screenshot showing what this really means. You will be impressed. Oh, and somebody probably ought to mirror that screenshot somewhere.

This is one of those stories of Russian research, originally belittled by serious Western Scientists... until one of them finds out the same thing. This time, the late Professor Herbert Fröhlich FRS of Liverpool University and his PhD student Dr Hyland of Warwick University shows that all living beings emit coherent light of very low intensity. Given that he ties this to the health of a metabolism, it makes me wonder whether enlightenment does not have a literal meaning too. Apparently the Russian laws take this phenomenon into account, with laws 1000 times more stringent than those of the US/UK, for any manufacturer of microwave emitting devices.

A new Linux distribution has been released. This one is called Linux-Mandrake and has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. Its goal is to provide an easy to use environment for beginners, and provides out-of-the-box support for French users (accents, etc). It's based on Redhat 5.1 (with all bug fixes up to 17th July) and a fully functional KDE. Users can mount their CD's without messing with /etc/fstab. It seems a good idea as an introduction as long as it does not lead to dumber users.

Geoff Harrison (mandrake) writes "Yes, enlightenment DR 0.14 has been released. you can get some information or download it."

Geoff Harrison (mandrake) writes "Just thought I would take this time to say a few words about the up and coming release (yes, we're looking at likely friday night / saturday morning FOR REAL this time) But I'm sure that a lot of people have likely been going nutzo about No it isn't out QUITE yet! how many times can I say that you can find copies of it floating around all over the place, but if you download something before this coming weekend, "it ain't the official release". Yes, there are rpms already auto-building. Yes, there will be daily snapshots from the source tree even after the release. Yes, it is true that there will likely also be daily rpms built and distributed of the source tree. Yes, the ftp server is coming back (it's been down forever and a day). Yes, it is true that there are no root menus, iconification, or pager in 0.14 (we decided to get a stable release out in our lifetimes). But there are a lot of new features including the beginnings of a configurator, real online help, an entirely new and improved configuration language, a completely revamped memory management codebase, and plenty of other nifty features (too many to go over here). Yes, the code was completely scrapped from enlightenment 0.13.3 for 0.14 -- we decided that the old codebase was getting too unwieldy for where we want to be able to take enlightenment in the future, so we rewrote the book again. It's looking very promising, and we hope that you will like it as much as we do. (I'd like to think that it was worth the wait) --mandrake "

Allright I know I said no more Gnome/KDE stuff, but Bruce Perens asked me to post this, and its worth reading. Now I'm going to be frank here guys, keep the comments under control. I know this is a hot issue, but think before you post. This issue is a major schism, and we need to solve it, not bicker amongst ourselves about it. Now hit the link below and read Bruce Perens rebuttal to Linus' opinions on the KDE/Gnome debate. Update I had to close the comments. Not because they were bad, but because we had 95% of the httpd processes on this machine serving up that story. 200+ comments in 6 hours was just too much. Anyone wanna swap a boatload a RAM for advertising? If we can get more RAM, this hopefully won't happen again.

Intrepid reviewer Rick Franchuk has returned with another review, this time of the JavaScript Sourcebook. Yes, in full living text, read about how organization can sink or make a book. And, maybe, you can learn how to the mouseover as well. So, click below to read Rick's incisive review.

Chris Marston has written a piece entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons" where he talks about open source development, and issues it will face in the future. Particularly the human issues for the people who create the code we all enjoy, and how ego, and fame fit in. It rings very true.

Our drive back proved much less eventful then the drive down, and now having had a nice nap, I'm ready to post a final batch of rants and rambles about the Expo and my experiences there. Hit the link below to read more. And now since I'm back, I should be reading email again, and of course posting articles more regularly.

Several people dropped this in my box, so I'm not going to name anyone in specific, but apparently Raster has a Snapshot of E14 available here. It's been a long time coming, and I gotta wait until tonight to try it out! Maybe this will give me the incentive I need to finish my Slashdot theme.

George Russell. posted his predictions for the future to c.o.l.a. and sent a copy of it here as well. Hit the link below to read his predictions- I think he's pretty much right on with most of his guesses.

I know I know, it was about time already. Well big thanks go to Stephen Langasek for putting this release together for us. I believe we should have RH5 compatibility, imlib 1.*, fixed load meter, a configure script and tons of other nifty little things. Snag it from My Enlightenment Page. We should be caught up now. If something is missing from this release, feel free to send me a diff.

Here is something to think about. A friendly war is being waged over what your X desktop will look like in the years to one. Hit the link below to read about the two major contenters, KDE and Gnome, what I think about them, and why they need to work together.

Chris Thomas (aka x5rings in IRCland) has set up a poll page to pick your favorite E theme. So run on over there and vote for Obsidian or Flaunt.

Recent activities on the Gnome front have made it a hot topic. RHAD snagged Raster and declared Enlightenment will soon use the Gnome API. Imlib will be ported to GTK. It's a crazy world guys. Anyway, Federico Mena was the frist to tell me that a new GNOME is out for testing.

I haven't even had time to download the last one, but already the DR13.2 release of enlightenment is available for download. Go grab it.

Mandrake was kind enough to release Enlightenment DR 0.13.1. Mostly a bugfix release, the most notable improvement is the fact it will now compile under glibc, for those who were having trouble earlier.

I know I procrastinated on this one, but I've been really busy lately. Anyway, DR9 is available for download for the E FTP Server. Mostly bug fixes, but we now have sysnice/user in the load meter, and tool tips. Read more about this release at my Enlightenment page.