Xfce 4.2.0 released

The next major version of the popular, multi-platform desktop environment brings new applications and numerous improvements to the existing applications.

Siegen, Germany -- January 16, 2005 -- Today the Xfce Team announced the release of version 4.2.0 of the Xfce Desktop Environment and Development Framework for Unix and Unix-like platforms. Xfce 4.2 adds several new applications, support for bleeding edge features, greater usability, performance and better internationalization to the desktop environment.

Xfce 4.2 consists of a number of components that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment. They are packaged separately and users can pick and choose from the available packages to create the best personal working environment. Xfce 4.2 includes some new applications, like a session manager, an application finder and a menu editor, and comes with a new and beautiful icon theme, which complies with the freedesktop.org icon theme standard. The existing applications have been improved in the areas of functionality, usability and interoperability with other applications and desktop environments. In addition to that, Xfce 4.2 supports bleeding edge features like the new X.org Composite extension and related extensions, which enables you to use real transparency for the windows on your desktop. To obtain the best possible user experience, Xfce 4.2 includes several new themes for a perfect, unified working environment.

With the ever increasing popularity of the Xfce desktop environment, people have started to write third-party applications that enhance the basic desktop functionality provided by Xfce. Besides the various additional panel plugins available from the Xfce Goodies project, there are currently two applications available, that were developed with focus on Xfce. These applications are Xfmedia [ http://spuriousinterrupt.org/projects/xfmedia/ ], which is a lightweight media player with a nice and intuitive user interface, and Terminal [ http://terminal.os-cillation.com/ ], which is a lightweight and easy-to-use terminal emulator for Xfce.

Xfce is Free Software. The separate components are released under either the BSD license, the GNU Lesser General Public License or the GNU General Public License. The source code is freely available and while Xfce is highly portable to all Unix flavors, there is already native support and packages for many popular Linux distributions, SPARC and x86 Solaris 8/9, FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x, NetBSD 1.x and 2.x, OpenBSD 3.x, while more Unix and other X11-based plattforms are expected to be supported out-of-the-box soon.

About Xfce

Xfce is a free software project that provides a lightweight desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while remaining visually appealing and easy to install and use. Originally built as a free alternative to industry's standard desktop environment, CDE, it has evolved into a completely new, innovative and widely deployed desktop environment with exceedingly growing popularity. Currently, more than 60 developers, translators, artists and helpers from every corner of the globe contribute their and effort to the project.

About the Xfce Team

The Xfce Team is comprised of many volunteer developers, translators, artists and others who are committed to the advancement of the Xfce desktop environment. The group helps determining Xfce's vision and roadmap. Xfce is a free software project which develops a lightweight desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The project offers a responsive, stable, efficient, intuitive and innovative user interface with minimum migration path as it is among the very few fully compliant, with the freedesktop.org standards, desktop environments.

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