This month we look at Seagate hard drive announcements; Mandriva's Gdium netbook; new Red Hat solutions; JasperForge v2; AMD Linux drivers; and Gnome Linux on Garmin's Nuvi 880, 860, and 5000 navigation devices.

The stable version of Debian 5.0 is scheduled for September, but KDE backports are available already.

Fifteen years ago, on Saturday the 16th of August, 1993, Ian Murdock wrote an email to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup , announcing his upcoming Debian Linux Release.

The developers were criticized for KDE 4.0. At the time, they pointed to KDE 4.1 – and it turns out they were right. The new version is far more stable and mature.

Version 2.23.5 of the Gnome Linux desktop gives a preview of version 2.24, which is scheduled for release in September.

At first, plans for Gtk+ 3 were considered unnecessary – the developers themselves considered the 2.x version mature enough – now, some developers are toying with the idea of developing Gtk+ 3. Gnome founder Miguel de Icaza comments on and criticizes the developments in his blog.

KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation will be holding their annual Akademy and GUADEC conferences jointly next year in Gran Canaria.

The developers of the Gnome desktop environment have denied the necessity of Gnome version 3.0, but now things are happening. Initial plans for a 3.0 release were revealed at the Gnome developer conference, Guadec, along with details of Gtk+ 3.0.