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After undergoing over two years of development Xfce 4.4.0 is finally released. A visual tour of Xfce 4.4.0 can be experienced here.

Among the most notable addition to this release is the inclusion of the Thunar file manager. Thunar’s extensibility is one of the features that makes it a much more robust file manager compared to its predecessor; Xffm.

I’ll be downloading this build as soon as I reach home. I’ve been running beta versions of Xfce 4.4 since its first release and I don’t think I’ll be looking back to KDE or Gnome any time soon

Namesys, the company behind the ReiserFS and Reiser4 filesystems, is being put up for sale by Hans Reiser. Wired News has this covered pretty well in this article.

The reason behind the sale is bizarre to say the least. Apparently, Hans Reiser has been charged with murdering his wife. He’s selling the company to help cover mounting legal fees (viva litigious USA!).

If I had the money, I’d definitely purchase Namesys. I’ve been using Reiser4 for over a year now on my home box’s /opt partition and pretty well pleased with it. I would convert my other partitions to it if it wasn’t for complications due to my own stupidity in designing the partition scheme during my newbie days. Heck it might even happen if I had a spare hard disk to help in the migration. ReiserFS on the other hand, has always been my preferred filesystem for servers I configured.

But now, I have to consider the future of Namesys, specifically who its new owner(s) will be before I decide whether or not to continue using their filesystems in the future.

Xfce 4.4 Beta 2 was announced a few hours ago on the Xfce mailing list. The changelog detailing fixes and features added from 4.4 Beta 1 can be read here.

I’ve been using 4.4 Beta 1 since it was released and must say that it does look much prettier than the 4.2 releases. It’s still lightweight and fast though. One thing I did not like so much was the creation of desktop icons for minimised applications, which is the default setting.

Also missed was xfcalendar that wasn’t included in the 4.4 Beta 1 release. No mention of it in the changelog, so until I get Beta 2 up and running on my home box, I’m assuming that it’s still not included in this release… which kinda sucks.

Downloads are available on this page.

The first beta of Xfce 4.4 has been released as 4.3.90.1.

Downloads are available here.

NVidia has updated it’s Linux display drivers. The latest version is 1.0-8756, and it was released on 7 April 2006. This is the first update to the Linux NVidia display drivers in almost four months.

The good news is that my Latest NVidia Linux display drivers feed managed to successfully capture this release and updated itself. It’s safe to say that it passed this test with flying colours