Mark Shuttleworth writes "Ubuntu 4.10, 'The Warty Warthog Release,' hit the wire today, with Gnome 2.8, Kernel 2.6 and the very best of Debian in a slick, quick, single-CD install." Read on below for the full announcement, including a link to order shrinkwrapped versions (for X86, AMD64 or PowerPC) free of charge. I'm still waiting on mine to try this out. (Note that Ubuntu is also one of the distros with a screen-by-screen walkthrough available through OSdir's screenshot-tour site.)

Chris writes "Did you know that OSDir now does frequently updated screenshots of open source apps, including Evolution 2.0, KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.8, Enlightenment DR 16.7.1, Thunderbird 0.8, and YaST? Have a look!" These screenshot tours are a great way to see how polished (or not) a particular piece of software is getting, especially when you absolutely have to know what every menu item holds.

Raymond Lodato writes "For a number of years now, I've been playing with Linux at my company. My laptop is dual-boot, and I've been trying to steer away from Windows as much as I possibly can. Most of the books I've read have been geared either to running Linux as a server, or as a personal workstation. The gap has been filled. Moving to the Linux Business Desktop, by Marcel Gagné, covers what you need to know to successful run Linux as a business workstation." Read on for the rest.

Chris writes "To give you a feel for what to expect in Core 3, we've done 120 screenshots of a full installation of Fedora Core 3 Test 3. Our screenshots include Gnome, KDE, and XPce interfaces. This is the last planned test release before the final release, scheduled for November 1."

An anonymous reader writes "After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE. Read more about their decision here. It looks like companies as well as distributions start focusing towards one solution." Patrick Volderking's quoted message doesn't announce a final decision to drop GNOME from Slackware, however -- and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack.

prostoalex writes "eWeek Labs reviewed the latest editions of GNOME and KDE desktop environments, and for all the criteria that eWeek uses for evaluating the software products ranked 'good,' while usability, capability and reliability for both products ranked 'excellent.' The online version is missing the screenshots and ranking tables that the printed version has, but eWeek likes Evolution (for mail), Konqueror (for file management), Samba and Kopete. They dislike GConf (still complex and a hassle to use) on GNOME and KMail on KDE."

peterprior writes "Novell have issued a press release announcing SUSE Linux 9.2. The new version comes with kernel 2.6, KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.6 and features (amongst other things) enhanced wireless support as well as Evolution 2.0 with Groupwise / Exchange connectivity. The WYSIWYG web development tool Nvu is also included. The new release is expected to hit the retail shelves in early November."

OctaneZ writes "DistroWatch is reporting the first release of Mandrake 10.1 for PPC, this is the first PPC upgrade from the Mandrake camp since April of 2003. Release 10.1 includes stepping up to kernel 2.6.8, Gnome 2.6, and KDE 3.2.3. Release Notes and Torrent are available."

worm eater writes "On September 29, Terra Soft Solutions delivered the final release of Yellow Dog Linux v4.0 to their CD manufacturer. It is currently available for download by ydl.net subscribers. Yellow Dog Linux v4.0 is built upon Fedora Core 2, offering both KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.6.0 desktops with an all new presentation for both the Installer and post-installed desktop environment. Expanded USB support includes many cameras, printers, adapters, and storage devices. FireWire support is now built-in with bootable FireWire made possible through manual configuration. Mac-On-Linux offers the ability to run Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and now offers automatic network configuration."

vertigo writes "I am reasonably proficient in C and C++ as well as the more common scripting languages, but i always felt the lack of a sweet spot between the hard and fast low-level programming languages and the loosely typed scripting languages. Lately, my interest in the Mono project has been growing. The C# language appears to offer just that sweet spot between power and productivity I've been looking for, and its class libraries like Gtk# seem to provide the programmer with a very clean and intuitive API." Read on for vertigo's review of Mono: A Developer's Handbook from O'Reilly.

riggwelter writes "FootNotes reports the availability of GNOME 2.8.0 packages for SUSE Linux. For the first time, a new GNOME desktop release is available for SUSE within a couple of weeks of the source release."

Gentu writes "OSNews features an interview with Mikael Hallendal, founder of Imendio HB. Imendio is the professional face of GTK+ worldwide today, offering Gnome & GTK+ consultancy services, however the company is also well known in the OSS community with their releases of GPL'ed software like the MS Project-alike Planner, DevHelp, the Jabber client Gossip, the music player Jamboree, DrWright & the popular Mono-based RSS reader Blam!. The interview digs on the increase of the industry's interest on Gnome, how GTK# and Mono fit in the Gnome development world, what's still missing from the platform and how a professional GTK+ developer thinks of Qt."

JimLynch writes "Pardon me while I pimp one of my own stories. We've got a review of Ubuntu Linux up on ExtremeTech. Check it out. Overall we had quite a positive experience with it, we think it's going to be a good distro as it matures. If you're looking for an easy-to-install debian distro, give it a download." Update: 09/27 23:25 GMT by T : Eugenia writes with another review from USALug, and a 6-page comprehensive Ubuntu preview at OSNews, writing "Gnome's & Ubuntu's release manager Jeff Waugh also had an interesting interview detailing lots of interesting tidbits. The final version of Ubuntu is expected mid-October."

comforteagle writes "This seems to be slow getting out, but since Novell hasn't updated their site ... Evolution 2.0.0 has been released. Most importantly it has built in JunkFilter support with SpamAssassin, web calendars, and NNTP support. Oh, and some bugfixes. I've posted some screenshots today as well."

psykelus writes "Ubuntu Linux, a Debian-based distro (formerly flying the flag of 'no-name-yet.com') annouced a preview of their first release (Warty Warthog) earlier today. Ubuntu is the most shiny Debian-based distrobution ever, sporting Gnome 2.8 and an extremely streamlined, mostly automatic installation & configuration process." For a limited time, they're also sending out free disks on request.

damogar writes "The GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Platform release is the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment, out today, with an awesome schedule time. Some pretty cool improvements have been made, specially the Nautilus file manager, the new MIME system and others. Release notes are already available, as well as screenshots and a variety of sources. Enjoy!" jimmy_dean adds a plug for the new GNOME Journal, which is meant to be a source of "good written material surrounding GNOME and the opinions of the community."

ozy writes "With all the fuss about searching and Spotlight and WinFS, check out the Database File System a completely different interface for your files, implemented in KDE. There is actually a request for developers to join a project to implement this under GNOME and leave how we use the desktop today behind."

prisonernumber7 writes "X.org is showing a lot of progress! The combination of the XFixes extension, Damage extension, Composite extension and XEvIE (X Event Interception Extension) present in X11R6.8 present user interface designers with a wide range of here-to-fore difficult to achieve possibilities. What does this mean for the enduser? That's window shadows and window shadows within windows as well as true translucency for the OSS community. Good samples of Gnome and KDE desktops with drop shadows, and so on can be found here, here, here, here, here, translucency here, here and here, and its use on handhelds running Linux."

Freshly Exhumed writes "Warly has announced the availability of Mandrake Linux 10.1 RC1 via torrent or FTP for those who enjoy bug reporting. Key ingredients: kernel 2.6.8 with parts of 2.6.9, xorg 6.7.0, KDE 3.2.3, Gnome 2.6, Mozilla 1.7.2, glibc 2.3.3, and gcc 3.4.1, among other goodies found in over 1,800 packages. This announcement follows on the heels of the Mandrake & LaCie project known as GlobeTrotter, a USB hard drive-based Mandrake distribution portable to most of today's PCs."

FlipmodePlaya writes "Linux Today reports the first release candidate for Gnome 2.8 has been released. A look at the new stuff can be found here. Notably, the possible inclusion of Evolution, and some networking goodies. My opinion: the GUI changes look too much like Windows/Internet Explorer for my tastes; I guess it's not just KDE."