ubiquitin writes "While KNOPPIX has been around for some time, the GNOPPIX project has only recently made its first release. The main difference is that it lets you boot into the GNOME desktop environment. Usually forks are more trouble than they're worth, but given the limits of what you can compress onto a single CD, separate projects makes sense to me. Hopefully more widespread recognition will also bring about a few more mirrors."

wembley writes "The Associated Press is running a story about a forthcoming Sharp laptop with a 3D screen. I can't find any pictures, but it requires no glasses, so you don't have to walk around looking like Biff's sidekick in Back to the Future. It comes with WinXP, but it's only a matter of time before we're arguing here about what looks better in 3D, Gnome or KDE."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says that GNOME 2.4.0 is now available for FreeBSD. Unfortunately, due to timing issues with FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, it will not make it into the official ports tree until after 4.9 is released (looks like early October right now). In the meantime, you can get to it from his CVS tree. For those without CVS access, he has periodic tarballs made, and are downloadable from the same URL. You should also download the marcusmerge script to aid in merging his ports tree with the official tree. If you already have a copy of the script, download it again because things have changed." Update: 09/18 15:25 GMT by M : FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says due to popular demand, but more importantly to the fact that 4.9-RELEASE has been pushed back at least two weeks, GNOME 2.40 has been merged into the ports tree.

chendo writes "Gnome 2.4 will be released today. Here is the link to the article on Ars Technica. GNOME 2.4 is the result of quite a bit of work toward complying with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which mainly focus on user interface consistency and predictability. This release has also undergone some general polish, and it can finally be said that the GNOME 2 platform has achieved maturity with this release. The Epiphany web browser, a major new component of GNOME, also makes its debut with this release. (From Footnotes)"

Crypto Gnome writes "News Interactive is reporting that anti-spam legislation is being fast-forwarded by the Australian Federal Government. The proposed law will ban sending commercial emails without the recipient's prior consent and ban the use of email harvesting or list-generating software. Naturally, this will only directly impact local Australian spammers, but they're also hoping this will set a precedent for the International community." Banning list-generation software seems a bit heavy-handed, doesn't it?

JigSaw writes "OSNews is reporting on Storage, an innovative project which aims to replace the traditional hierarchical filesystems with a new document store which is database-based (PostgreSQL). The current implementation, built under Gnome 2.x for now, offers natural language access, network transparency, and a number of other features. The project is currently in alpha (screenshots already available), and it is part of the next major generation of Gnome. It is currently developed by Seth Nickell, the person responsible for the enhanced Gnome usability on 2.x and its HIG, among other things."

drdink asks: "I am an avid FreeBSD and Windows user. This semester for a class I'm having to use MacOS X for the first time, and I've also been pondering jumping into the Apple scene anyway. However, I am also visually impaired and I can't seem to find a way to do specific color theming in a way similar to Windows, KDE, and GNOME. I want to be able to say 'Text is white, backgrounds are black, but EVERYTHING ELSE is its normal color.' The only options I've found that are similar is using 'White on Black' in the Universal Access control panel. However, this results in me losing all display colors and my machine looking monochrome. I don't want to use a $2,000+ machine just to have no colors. Is there anybody out there who has actually managed to get Mac OS X to use the normal colors but have high contrast white on black dialog boxes? I am interested in the Apple platform, but I can't use it for useful things, if I have no color."

StArSkY writes "The Australian has an article today outlining how Telstra, Australia's largest Telco, is switching to Linux and open source on the desktop. Their pilot has been quite successful, and improved stability has been noticed. On trial are Star Office, Gnome, Mozilla and Wyse. Spending AUD$1.5 Billion a year on IT, means Telstra using Open Source is a massive boost to Open Source developers and support professionals. Not mentioned in the Article is that Telstra also just Dumped IBM Global Services, and will be running IT in-house again! Telstra will be hiring Linux-savvy people I think..."

Suresh Chandra Das writes "Gnumeric 1.2 is to be released on the 8th of September, and we have a preview of what is coming up ( mirrored here). Also, linmagau.org is running an interview with two of Gnumeric's lead developers -- Jody Goldberg and Andreas L. Guelzow."

Gianluca Insolvibile writes "I plead guilty: I have always admired Microsoft's COM architecture and the relative simplicity that allows you to reuse already installed components to create even complex programs. And I have always been fascinated by the distributed nature of DCOM, which seemed to me much more graspable than complex monsters like CORBA and J2EE. While looking for equally expressive Open Source component technologies among GNOME and KDE, I was never able to find something fitting my needs (I never got into Bonobo deeply enough, though)." Read on to see how this led Gianluca to Juval Loewy's O'Reilly-published Programming .NET Components, and what he thinks of the book.

ThaReetLad writes "In this article at DevX, Executive Editor A. Russell Jones makes the case for a standardised GUI for Linux. He argues that the promotion of choice of GUI as a positive feature of using Linux is detrimental to its chances of attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly. From the article: '...the open source community must recognize that its primary goals: freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user.' In particular he argues that the choice of desktop between KDE, Gnome, IceWM etc, is not one that a former windows user, even a fairly technically competent one, is going to able to make an informed choice on, and that they should not be forced to make that choice in order to get good use out of any applications they might want to use."

An anonymous reader writes: "FootNotes is reporting about what might be the coolest thing since textmode Quake: a curses-based GTK-2.0 port called Cursed GTK. This not only makes it possible to give Gnome the look and feel of Contiki, but also brings many real opportunities, such as remote logins where X forwarding is not possible, or remote logins over very slow modem lines. Screenshots here, here, here and here! Patches for bugs are welcomed by the authors."

magellan writes "Sun has released screenshots of its upcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop. Mad Hatter includes GNOME, StarOffice, Evolution, and Mozilla. Sun has made minor modifications to Gnome to make it more familiar to Windows users. Sun's Mad Hatter, along with SuSE's new push on the desktop, could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."

A user writes "The latest beta release of Gnumeric has been released. According the the developers, it is now ready and stable enough for general use and deployment, and the final 1.2.0 release will be made on September 8th. This release also marks the realization of a major milestone -- all of the worksheet functions in the U.S. version of MS Excel are now supported. I have been using 1.1.19 for quite some time now, and it is incredibly fast, and hugely improved compared to Gnumeric 1.0."

valluvar9000 asks: "I recently was able to talk a local secondary school (public) into letting me convert their existing computer systems (not in use and in storage) into a LTSP based setup. They are OK with it as long as it does not cost them money. However the whole solution needs to be deployed in the local language (Tamil) as the medium of instruction is not English. Fortunately Tamil (TSCII & Unicode) support is widely available and quite mature on KDE and GNOME. Can Slashdot help with the selection of good educational tools (Maths, Science, General problem solving and any other topic of interest) that are GUI based (KDE preferably) and internationalizable (this is important)? The target ages are between 6 years to 12 years."

A user writes "Siemens Business Systems, after conducting an extensive survey on non technical workers ("secretaries and managers, not IT people") is predicting that the Linux desktop will capture 20% of the market for desktop computers in large enterprises within the next 5 years. Senior program manager Duncan McNutt, who has overseen Siemens's testing of Linux desktops with users and administrators in enterprise settings, believes that the Ximian desktop and application suite, running on either SuSE or Red Hat, requires two days of training, which is the same as what most enterprises budget for a Windows/MS Office version upgrade. Interestingly, they used Ximian Desktop, instead of KDE, because Gnome, particularly Ximian's version, was "different enough" to set user expectations that the experience would be less like Windows. "

JanneM writes "Gnome 2.4 is arriving early september. Sayamindu Dasgupta has installed the 2.3.5 development release to see what's in store, and has written a very nice overview of the upcoming release." Update: 08/14 16:06 GMT by M : The author has provided a mirror.

Deusy writes "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba. I've heard a lot of noise with regards to Karamba (and Super Karamba) and a lot of moans from Gnome users about the lack of a Gnome equivalent. Hopefully this should fill that void and more, as one of the developers comments that gDesklets is the product of "months of planning" and describes Karamba as an "ugly hack"."

Spencerian writes with a review combining two things you might not expect in one volume: the "For Dummies" label and Sun Solaris. (Raise your hand if you've never, ever looked through a "For Dummies" book.) Read on for Spencerian's summary of Solaris 9 For Dummies, which he says is a good book for the Solaris newbies, but not for everyone.

securitas writes "eWEEK has two related articles on the growth of open source software. The first article is about the growth of desktop Linux, featuring Lotus and the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) founder Mitch Kapor, who says (among other things) that call centers will be where the next wave of growth for desktop Linux happens and that 10 percent of global desktops will be Linux in a few years. He bases his statements on a report by Eazel and GNOME Foundation co-founder Bart Decrem entitled 'Desktop Linux Technology and Market Overview' (PDF) mentioned last week. The second story is about open source software growth in the government sector where government agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau have embraced OS software for projects like the State and County QuickFacts site. Based on Perl, Apache, MySQL and Linux, the site gets 200,000 page views a day."