Release Digest: General, June 9, 2003

XFce4 Beta-1

[ Thanks to Biju
Chacko for this link. ]

This is just to announce the first beta release of the XFce4
desktop. Here is an excerpt from the release notes:

What is it?

XFce 4 is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems.
It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually
appealing and easy to use. It is based on the GTK+ toolkit version
2 and aims to adheresto the standards defined on
http://freedesktop.org.

XFce 4 consists of a number of components that together provide
the full functonality of the desktop environment. The modular
design allows you to pick and choose from the available packages to
create the best personal working environment.

XFce 4 is all free software. Each component is released under a
BSD, LGPL or GPL licence.

What is new?

Beta 1 is the first public development release of the next
generation of the XFce desktop environment. It is a complete
rewrite from XFce 3.

Highlights of the release include:

• Based on GTK2: improved general appearance, antialiased
  fonts.
• Modular design: pick and choose from the available
  packages.
• Development platform: XFce 4 provides a set of libraries that
  make it easy to create programs that fit in with the desktop
  environment, providing utility functions, widgets and dialogs and a
  global preferences framework.
• Standards compliant window manager with great themeing
  capabilities, and a lot of themes to go with it.
• Improved panel with horizontal and vertical mode, autohide and
  a plugin framework for third-party add-ons.
• Filemanager with integrated SMB network browser.
• Settings manager for global preferences of XFce components and
  user interface settings.
• A number of additional packages like a taskbar, an iconbox and
  a printer dialog.

Please go to http://www.xfce.org for more
information.

Source tarballs, srpms and rpms are available on the xfce
sourceforge repository: http://xfce.sf.net. Pkgsrc packages for
*BSD are available from http://pkgsrc-wip.sf.net. Debian packages
are available in the Debian ‘unstable’ tree. Packages are or will
soon be available for Slackware, Gentoo and Lunar Linux.

Please report bugs to xfce4-dev@xfce.org (You will need to
subscribe to the list).

Have Fun!