Tim Ferro

“Officially, Microsoft has been saying “the first half of 2008″ whenever the company is asked to put a date for the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3). However, various sources have been expecting the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build to become available in the second half of April. Now, according to tech site Neowin, Microsoft’s release schedule for XP SP3 is as follows…” – Source

” Fedora 9 beta is available for download today, with a final release scheduled for April 29. The latest version of the free (as in beer) cousin of Red Hat Linux comes with a number of major updates, including support for the latest versions of the KDE and GNOME desktop environments.” – Source

“No more betas, release candidates, or other test builds for Windows Vista SP1. Microsoft is pushing the final version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 out the door. You can download standalone installers for X86 and X64 systems from Microsoft starting today.” – Source

“Microsoft has released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 for download by willing testers, which debuted this week at the Mix conference in Las Vegas. Intended for developers and designers only, IE8’s most intriguing new feature so far is “Web Slices,” which lets you monitor a single section of a web page, like an eBay auction (similar to Leopard’s Web Clips.) Web developers will be excited about better standards compliance.” – Source

“AVG is ready to pull the trigger on their new Anti-Virus suite, AVG Anti-Virus 8.0. From first looks, it’s going to be a pretty major update.

For starters, AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 will offer more than its standard Anti-Virus protection. Popular tools AVG Anti-Spyware, AVG Anti-Rootkit, and LinkScanner, previously stand-alone applications, are now integrated into AVG Anti-Virus 8.0. The code base has seen a significant overhaul as well, in the hopes that inevitable system slowdowns caused by AVG’s real-time protection will be lessened.” – Source

“The wacky developers behind the popular Ubuntu linux distribution have chosen a code name for Ubuntu 8.10, or the version that will be released after the next version. Following the longstanding tradition of giving each new version a two word name with an adjective followed by an animal, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu 8.10 will be known as Intrepid Ibex. No, really.” – Source

“The first alpha release of Fedora 9 (codenamed Sulphur) was announced this morning on the Fedora mailing list. This alpha, which provides a first look at the features of Fedora’s next release, includes GNOME 2.21, KDE 4.0, Firefox 3 beta 2, version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel, and many other improvements.” – Source

“On January 11th, 2008, at roughly 7 am ET, KDE 4 became available for download. Not that we were refreshing our browsers or anything in anticipation. Packages are currently available for Kubuntu (Hardy and Gutsy), Debian (in the experimental branch), Fedora (in the Rawhide repository), Gentoo and openSuSE. ArkLinux and Mandriva packages will be available soon.” – Source