Advanced skinning, individualized desktops, animated icons, shiny colors and flashy windows: which alternative shell (for Windows) is the best?

Arno Klenke has recently checked in the media framework to Syllable CVS. Functionality of this initial checkin is impressive, with video and audio playback in many common formats via the FFMpeg codec plugin, the ability to play multiple audio streams with stream mixing and video playback with video overlays or playback with a bitmap display on systems which do not support overlays. You can check out some screenshots of the Media Player and ColdFish in action.

The Lycoris Development Team is hard at work finishing Desktop/LX Update 3, and release candidate 1 is now available. All users can use the Update Wizard to update their systems to build 127, available from the mirrors. It includes many more bugfixes and user improvements. Update 3 is slated for an early September release.

The official project for the replacement of the SkyOS GUI, the SkyOS GUI Design Contest, is now underway. You may view the current submissions at the website here. If you would like to contribute a design, please read the instructions on the first page of the site. Submissions will be accepted until September 8th. At that point, the designs will judged in an open community vote. The top 3 designs will move on, and will be judged by the designers, the community, and Robert (creator of SkyOS). The new GUI will appear in SkyOS v5.0. Update: The site's earlier bandwidth problems have been solved.

AMD's upcoming Athlon 64 low-end variants, codenamed 'Paris' and 'Victoria', will not be offered as 64-bit processors but as 32-bit upgrades to the current Athlon XP line. So claims Xbit Labs, having glanced at the chip maker's latest roadmaps.

As of August 6, 2003, IRIX 6.5.21 is releasing with all new systems shipping from SGI worldwide manufacturing centers. The IRIX 6.5.21 release contains both maintenance and feature updates. This release continues the focus on stability, reliability, security, and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.XX quarterly release process.

FrankoBoy writes for Slashdot: "CRN has an interview with SuSE CEO Richard Seibt in which he claims such things as 'Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else.' Another example of this kind of corporatespeak can be found in another interview he did with ZDNet last week. DistroWatch has an article about all this in its current weekly newsletter."

XFS is a high-performance journaling file system. It provides quick recovery after a crash, fast transactions, high scalability, and excellent bandwidth. Numerous changes were made for 1.3.0.

Here are some screenshots of Sun Microsystems' Mad Hatter Linux-based desktop. The original Mad Hatter was supposed to be based on Red Hat Linux, but these screenshots show that Sun has taken the project in its own hands. The product was created originally so that Sun had a cheap and modern workstation/desktop solution to offer to its existing costumers who were a step from leaving the more expensive Sun Solaris solutions for the overall cheaper and uber-hyped Linux.

Robert Scoble, technology evangelist for Longhorn at Microsoft, has called into question several purported screenshots of the next-generation Longhorn interface code-named "Aero." "These look like early demonstration screens, and not how Longhorn will eventually look," Scoble wrote in his Web log. "The real "Aero" is one of Longhorn's biggest secrets -- I've seen it, but can't load it on my own machine and am locked out of the server where it's kept," says Microsoft's Scoble. "I am not even sure they'll show it off at the PDC." Indeed, the screenshots are using icons from all over the place (including a BeOS icon), which proves that these are just early concepts/mockups and not the real/finished thing.

A new version of Mono is available, the new features include: Cairo support, Remoting.Corba support, as well as a managed XSLT implementation. Existing features have been improved vastly: better Windows.Forms, runtime, faster compiler, web services, better compliance to the spec and more. On other C# news, the .NET Compact Framework 1.0 SP1 Redistributable is available.

The World Intellectual Property Organization was planning on having a discussion at its next conference on open collaborative projects (such as the internet), including open source software. So many participants were interested in the open source discussion that it started quite a buzz. Now, lobbyists with pockets full of money from Microsoft and other interests are pushing to have the meeting scuttled. They say that a discussion on open source has no place in a meeting about Intellectual Property (as if non-proprietary IP isn't IP too).

In order to protect itself from DDoS attacks, Microsoft is using the Akamai service to distribute its load. Ironically, as a result, the domain www.microsoft.com is now listed in the Netcraft report as being Linux running IIS. Netcraft has received so much mail asking about that, and the irony of Linux-bashing Microsoft now depending on "enterprise-class" Linux servers has generated so much discussion, Netcraft has posted a page explaining what's happening.

For those interested in looking at the screenshots for Solaris 10 (with gnome pre-installed) and a dmesg checkout here. Update: It seems that the site got OSNews'ed moments after the story went live.