XFce4 Beta-1 Release

Hello:

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!

--
Biju 'botsie' Chacko
Core Developer
XFce4 Desktop Environment