Earlier this month we had shared the progress of X.Org 7.4 with the features slated to be included in this next X release, what features have been postponed, and the repeated delays that always seem to plague the X.Org development community. Since then there still has yet to be any official update on its status, but the Wiki continues to claim a May 2008 release.

I just took a quick tour of the newest version of KDE 4.2. Release Candidate 1. Sometime around the end of the month, the KDE developers will unleash the official 4.2 release upon the world, and it will be picked up by your distro creator of choice sometime soon afterwards. At any rate, KDE 4.2 will include a bunch of new features, and some sorely needed bug-fixes.

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.8. This is our 28th release on CD-ROM (and 29th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.8 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system.

The Open Source project behind the Google Chrome browser called Chromium has finally established an official Alpha release and it promises to be a very lightweight swiss army knife once completed.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 was released on October 14, 2008 and it currently comes in 36 fully-localised languages. This beta is based on Gecko 1.9.1 layout engine and according to the official website, this release features "significant changes to improve web compatibility, performance and ease of use". You can read the release notes on the official website, here.

Google has announced the official release on Windows of Chrome 4, an updated version of the company's Web browser. It offers a handful of significant improvements, including support for extensions and bookmark synchronization. Due to Chrome's rolling development model, these features have been widely used by testers for quite some time.

Keith Packard has announced the official release of X.Org Server 1.9 this evening. Besides this release offering up various bug-fixes and minor improvements, this X Server release is noteworthy as it happens to be the first release in recent times to actually make it out on time. X.Org Server 1.9 hit its original release schedule of being released on the 20th of August.

Last year Gentoo canceled their 2008 release plans to focus on putting out just one release per year, while in years past they had put out as many as four releases per calendar year.

The last time OpenSUSE users enjoyed a stable release was in November 2009 making today’s release of OpenSUSE 11.3 a pretty big deal. This is the first release in the new eight month release schedule for OpenSUSE. Here are some screenshots of the OpenSUSE 11.3 install, KDE and GNOME desktops, and details about some of the popular new features in this release.