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The first beta of XFCE 4 was released. Release notes here, and a number of screenshots here. On other X-related news, Enlightenment DR16.6-pre3 is available for testing, while Epiphany 0.7 for Gnome is out.

AmigaWorld.net has posted 4 new official AmigaOS4 screenshots. The latest screenshots were taken on an A4000 with PPC upgrade, running ExecSG and showing much of the default intuition look and Font Anti-Aliasing as is being demonstrated at AmigaOS4 on Tour events held across Europe. Larger scale versions of these screenshots should soon become available at the official AmigaOS website. Update: Higher quality images have been uploaded! (1024x768 in PNG format)

Hardened Gentoo's purpose is to make Gentoo viable for high security, high stability production server environments. This project is not a standalone project disjoined from Gentoo proper; it is intended to be a team of Gentoo developers which are focused on delivering solutions to Gentoo that provide strong security and stability. This machine is Hardened Gentoo's SELinux demo machine. The primary use of it is to test and audit SELinux integration, and policy.

Sun Microsystems is expected to announce at JavaOne the release of an update to its JXTA peer-to-peer protocol and framework for collaboration. Elsewhere, Sun Microsystems will spend tens of millions of dollars to emblazon all manner of computing products with a new Java logo, the company plans to unveil next week at its JavaOne conference.

Marcus Overhagen of OpenBeOS has just released the alpha of the new Media Kit. It's a bit feature-light at the moment, but already usable.

This is a sneak preview of what you can expect from Athene 3.1. New features include:

A few months ago I was designing the UI of Sequel OS. I am not part of the project anymore, but I kept developing the UI in my free time, just when I was feeling a bit creative. Yesterday, in my Gnome 2 article I mentioned that it would be nice if Gnome/GTK+ adopt a new default theme. So, here is my proposal for the project, mockups seen for the first time in public... Update: One more mockup I just (quickly) created just to show to some readers that the theme is clean when used in a normal app. Update2: Vote for the poll inside. Update3: Download the Gnome window manager theme here.

Borland Software has legions of software coders to thank for its sometimes improbable survival over the past two decades. Once again the company is trying to change its colors, but this time executives promise not to forget their roots. Read the article at ADTMag.

OmniWeb 4.5 public beta 1 is the first version of the Omni Group's Web browser to incorporate WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks from Apple -- the same frameworks Apple uses for its own Web browser, Safari. More specifically, improvements been made to bookmarks, AutoFill, plug-ins, history indexing and more. OmniWeb 4.5 beta 1 requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later. In other OSX releases, CodeTek VirtualDesktop 2.3.3 was released.

In an exclusive two-part interview with SunSpot, Apple Computer's co-founder discusses Steve Jobs and the company's roots. Read the first part here.

At last year's meeting of Apple shareholders, Steve Jobs was asked about videoconferencing and what it meant to Apple. "Stay tuned," he said. Sources now say that Apple is on the verge of offering videoconferencing functionality to users with an upgrade to its iChat software. Sources confirmed to Think Secret that the next version of iChat, code-named "Viceroy," will feature videoconferencing built-in. Additionally, the new iChat will reportedly boast support for a number of other IM protocols. Our Take: I hope that Apple will also feature support for my Creative WebCam PRO, a $40 camera, which is an extremely popular buy (well supported on Linux as well) but has no drivers for OSX so far.

Less than two months after launching its Windows Server 2003 operating system, Microsoft has released a security patch to fix a vulnerability that could let malicious sites run damaging code on the server. This might fair as a pretty good score for Microsoft and their massive Trustworthy Computing initiative, as in comparison, Red Hat Linux 9 had almost thirty security patches in two months.

A 1995 contract sheds light on the conflicting Unix ownership claims by Novell and SCO Group, with SCO receiving broad rights to the OS but Novell retaining copyrights and patents. Updated