Desktop environments Archive

"IceWM is perfect for Windows' 'immigrants' especially for users with older computers. IceWM will be suitable for advanced users who are looking for a lightweight and simple window manager." More here.

Various parts and applications of the ROX Desktop have been updated recently. Firstly, ROX-All 1.1 (a single archive containing launchers for most of the ROX applications) has been released; the main improvement is that it's now compatible with Ubuntu Edgy. Also, ROX-Filer 2.6 (the file manager at the core of the ROX desktop) has been released. Filer can be updated via the built-in update tool. Lastly, various important panel applets have been updated.

"The ROX Desktop is a lightweight alternative to GNOME or KDE built around the ROX-Filer file manager. The project's name is an abbreviation of 'RISC OS on X'. The ROX Desktop's performance is reminiscent of IceWM, and it's noticeably faster opening programs than GNOME or KDE. However, its speed comes at the expense of a needlessly redundant default configuration, and some users may balk at some of the assumptions its design makes about how they prefer to work."

In an attempt to convince The Open Group that they finally want to fully Open Source Motif and CDE Peter Howkins has started a petition to help gauge how much interest there is. CDE, the Common Desktop Enviroment, was the default desktop on several commercial UNIX distributions. Motif is a X Windows widget API used in many programs, including CDE and other projects such as nedit and DDD. Howkins is not going to try to convince anyone to use either of them, but if you use them and would like to see them Open Sourced please sign the petition. For more background information about CDE and this petition visit the petition site or go straight to signing the petition.

Enlightenment 0.16.8.2 has been released, and it includes some bugfixes and speed improvements. Remember that E16 is the 'old' Enlightenment; E17 is the new one, and there's a short article on HowtoForge explaining how to set it up: "Enlightenment 17 or E17 as it is generally called, is a cool Window Manager for X. The latest stable version of Enlightenment is E16 (0.16.8.2). In this article we will talk about the latest CVS build available (0.16.999.023)."

Matchbox is an Open Source base environment for the X Window System running on non-desktop embedded platforms such as handhelds, set-top boxes, kiosks and anything else for which screen space, input mechanisms or system resources are limited. Information on the 1.0 release is here.