beta

As I said in my last post we are not yet sure if we need to make some changes to namespaces before we can move from alpha to beta in the current 5.3.0 release cycle.

What I did not ask for explicitly is feedback from people that have already started developing code with namespaces.

These people are likely the best source of feedback on the current state of namespaces and if the proposed changes to namespaces would be useful or not.

Practical Technology: "Debian 5, Lenny, is getting closer to delivery and as part of that, the Debian Live Team has released the first official version of Debian Live."

Just days after Microsoft released the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, Google unexpectedly made what could be its largest assault on Redmond to date -- the release of its own Web browser.

Practical Technology: "I'm pleased to report that one of my favorite desktop Linux distributions, MEPIS, is returning. The beta of the next version, MEPIS 8, is now available."

Microsoft released its Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 test product today, and the company spilled a lot of pixels explaining the beta's new features, with some details for Web developers.

Mandriva Wiki: "Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 2 'okapi'. This beta includes a completely new installer for the Free (and, in the final release, Powerpack) edition, and is testing the Fedora system-config-printer printer configuration tool as an alternative to printerdrake."

Electronic Arts, the publisher of the upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, has chosen BitTorrent for the distribution of the closed Beta client.

Included in the documentation is a recommendation to use a TorrentFreak ’speed up’ guide.

OStatic: "Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP).

Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don't be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties."

Linux Loop: "Like it or not, one of the most important features of any Microsoft Office alternative is being able to read Microsoft Office files.

With the recently released OpenOffice 3.0 Beta adding support for importing Office 2007 (AKA OOXML, AKA .docx) files, I decided to test how it would handle files created in Microsoft Office 2007..."

Phoronix: "While our friends at DistroWatch only rate Zenwalk as the 19th most popular Linux distribution, we have been very impressed by their recent releases and have felt that it is a distribution worth trying as it is an unsung hero..."