OStatic

I was never one for cryptozoological taxidermic creations -- you won't find mermonkeys or crocoducks on display in my home. I have, however, for the last few weeks, been hiding a jackalope in my laptop bag. He was an experimental little guy, but the folks at Canonical and the vast community behind Ubuntu have completed the necessary gene splicing and DNA alterations and soon -- very soon -- the final, stable release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be let loose into the wild.

What's new this time around? How does it all work? And for the wilder types, where locally can you attend a Jaunty Jackalope release party?

Yesterday, the GNOME Project released the latest version of its desktop, GNOME 2.26. The new release incorporates the usual bug fixes and numerous accessibility and application improvements -- including updates to the GNOME Developer Platform and support for 48 languages.

Some of the notable new desktop features include updates to Evolution. The mail and groupware suite is better able to communicate with Exchange servers, as it adds support for both MAPI and SOAP protocols. The Brasero media burner, the Epiphany browser, the Orca screenreader, Empathy, and the GNOME Media Player have all seen signficant feature enhancements. The utilities for managing multiple desktops, pulse-audio, and fingerprint readers have also been updated.

Every Linux user has at least one -- a distribution that's near and dear to their hearts, even if it isn't installed on many (or any) of their machines at a given time. I've found Zenwalk, which I've talked about before, is one of those distributions. In anthropomorphic terms, it's Slackware's younger brother, a hip, handsome sibling with a strong family resemblance. Zenwalk brings the solid, stoic, server-oriented Slackware to the desktop user.

Zenwalk officially released its 6.0 version this weekend, featuring the newly released Xfce 4.6 desktop, the 2.6.28.7 kernel configured with gspca for better USB webcam support, and Netpkg enhancements.