A while ago back in January I came across this announcement on OSNews.com and made a mental note that this was something I had to try.
VirtualBSD 8.1 was released on or around 4/01/2011 and it basically gives you a pre-defined FreeBSD 8.1 installation with Xfce 4.6 and a range of applications in a virtual machine. It is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE in the form of a VMware appliance but can also in a few steps be made to run with VirtualBox. Read the instructions for that here.
As I already had VMware Player installed I went for using it as intended. Most of what I'm going to write you can also read on the VirtualBSD site so feel free to skip over.

Oh excitement, Slackware 13.37 is out! I've been running it for around a week now on one partition with only Window Maker and Xfce and Sbopkg to make it easier to add a few packages from SlackBuilds.org, and what can I say, it's Slackware, and it works.  The release announcement gives 25/04 as release date, but as of yesterday that message wasn't there in the changelogs and on the front page, so it seems that at least the announcement to the public was only done today.

With the big two desktop environments changing massively over the last few years and getting quite a bit heavier at the same time I thought I'ld look again at another alternative that's been a staple in the area of  window managers since release in 1997 - Window Maker. Initially it was WindowMaker by the way, but due to a naming conflict this had to be changed.  It is designed to emulate the look and feel of the NeXTstep GUI, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers.

With all the upheaval around Unity and Gnome Shell and not having used Ubuntu since 'Breezy Badger' (that was 5.10) I thought I take a fresh look at the upcoming version and the new desktop. Well, it's not that bad, and at least to me seems more accessible than the new Gnome because it works in a more traditional manner.

Also, Unity actually got up and running where Gnome 3 via the Fedora live CD just dropped me into fallback mode every time, with barely functional panels and no right click shell menu. I only got ATI cards here, but it is a huge blunder to get such an impression right from the start. I can only assess Gnome Shell from what I've seen in desktop recordings, but Unity for me has already won here.

CTKArch is a distribution, or perhaps more a spin, based on Arch Linux that is using Openbox as default window manager. It's minimal in size, if you believe that anything under CD size is minimal these days, and seems to be designed first and foremost to run from CD or USB as a live system, so it has a lot in common with ArchBang. Only a few days ago, 7th April, v. 0.7 was released into the wilderness of the Linux distribution jungle. I had toyed with 0.6 on and off for a few weeks and thus am in the position to make a few observations.

How could OSNews have missed this? The Commodore 64 is making a comeback and apparently the first batch has already sold out. You can order yours on CommodoreUSA.net at $595/around £365 for a basic model — the same price as the 1982 original, which includes an Intel Atom 1.8 Gigahertz processor, a 160 gigabyte hard drive and 2 gigabytes of memory. The high-end version of the latest Commodore includes a BluRay drive, 4 Gigabytes of memory, WiFi and a 1 TB hard drive for $895.

On 05/04 the second beta of the Salix main Xfce version was made available, and being one of my favorite distributions I just had to give it a quick spin and opted for a basic install. First impressions are excellent.  Things haven't changed much, and except a lovely fresh new wallpaper and login screen 13.37 looks exactly like the previous two. Good for when you actually want to get down to business and not relearn the interface every few months.

A new Slackware release is (almost) out, and it's got a rather odd number. Slackware 13.37 proves once again it's a distro from geeks for geeks, with a healthy dose of fun and humor and not taking ourselves too seriously. What I would call old-school geekdom.
With this out it's also time for all the derivatives to churn out new releases of all their main editions and the more minor desktop managers.

It seems like the same few blogs review the same distributions, but I've got a good excuse. Fedora 14 KDE finally got the better of me, it felt slow and everything generally took ages to open up, the menu was worse than the old days of Windows fade in menus (remember those?) and I removed it from my drive. I suppose this really is the last chance I gave it, KDE 4 is just not for me. Not to say that Gnome is, but at least it's more responsive.