The current development build of Syllable Desktop has a greatly increased installation menu. The options for IDE and USB CD players were merged, so that the troubleshooting options can now also be tried with a USB CD player. Specific installation options were added for the Acer Aspire One and ASUS EeePC netbooks. The EeePC requires compensation for its shifting of drive positions, which is now performed by the installer. This was tested for us by Hans Rood on the Summer SylCon, and the Aspire One was tested for us by Ruud Kuin. There are now more safe mode options for troubleshooting, such as an option to fully remove the USB 2 driver, which is buggy on some systems.

Experimental installation options were added for installing from and to USB memory sticks. These don't work yet, because Syllable doesn't start from USB devices other than CD players yet, but this is being worked on. Apart from Syllable's own AFS format, there's an option for starting from USB memory formatted with Linux's Ext2FS file system. Installing to USB is still unreliable on Syllable, so the Ext2FS option allows to experiment with creating a USB installation medium from Linux.

At a request from Carl Sassenrath, inventor of REBOL and the Amiga OS, Kaj has created a website that allows you to try the REBOL programming language without installing it. The site showcases the new REBOL version 3 that is close to going into beta release. It also offers to test the classic REBOL 2 and ORCA, the open source implementation of REBOL, and to make comparisons between them.

The website is running on Syllable Server 0.3, in development towards version 0.4. For this application, the security of the server operating system was enhanced to be able to offer the public to run generic REBOL scripts.

The website was made on top of the REBOL stack included in Syllable Server. It runs on the Cheyenne web server. It is made in a Model/View/Controller architecture with the network application platform we have been working on: a combination of the QuarterMaster web framework and the content management system that is also used to build our Syllable websites. This REBOL demo site marks the transition of this application platform to being capable of building advanced interactive websites.

At the request of our Spanish web master, Lucas Murad from Argentina, and Leo Ruilova, from Chile, Kristian has opened a section for Spanish speaking Syllable fans on our forum. Do come in and say hello to them!

Rui managed to port MEDNAFEN, an emulator of several classic game computers, including the Atari Lynx, Nintendo Game Boy, NES, Sega Master System and Neo Geo Pocket. Together with the other emulators that already run on Syllable, this brings us many classic games.

Our yearly summer conference will be held from Saturday July 18 to Saturday July 25 in the Netherlands. We will be sailing again on the Frisian vessel the Stêd Sleat while discussing and demoing the Syllable systems. This year we are offering several arrangements, so you can choose how many days you want to attend. There are discounts for longer stays and for kids, so you can make this into a nice vacation for your family. Contact Bas for arrangements.

The news sections of the websites have been extended with RSS feeds. If you prefer to follow Syllable news through an RSS reader application, you can now do so. Each selection of the news on the different sites has a corresponding feed. Look for the RSS icons. Please don't let your reader fetch the feeds too often. We don't publish news several times per day, so it's no use to check more often than a few times each day. Each news article now also has its own page, so the feeds can point to them. Good reading!

Anthony has implemented keyboard navigation in DiskManager. This means you will be able to install Syllable without using a mouse, in case the installation CD has problems with that. To do this, Anthony had to make fixes to keyboard handling in LibSyllable Views. This will also improve keyboard use in other applications.

Anthony has enlightened us by implementing auto-login. In the next Syllable Desktop development build, you will be able to go into the Users & Groups preferences and set a user account to log in automatically, without going through the password dialog.

A sigh of relief goes through the audience as we give you the new Syllable Desktop. Thanks go to those who contributed to it and those who helped shake out the last remaining bugs. Many of those were fixed, including several regressions from earlier releases. The window decorators don't destabilise the system anymore. The installation procedure is greatly enhanced with options to fix hardware support problems. The native web browser is replaced with Webster, based on a newer version of the WebKit engine. Many enhancements were made to standards support, leading, among others, to the ability to run QEmu - so now you can run virtual machines. The documentation was improved and several translations were added. Read more in the full release notes. ISO CD images, (VMware) emulator images, an upgrade pack and documentation are available from the download page. Extra software is available here.

There's a release candidate for Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 in our development builds now. If you want to influence the final version, this is your last chance to test it.

If you think the news articles here are out of line, that's because the websites got a brandnew news module. Custom-made for Syllable, just as the rest of the site. However, the older news items are still in the old style, which is less flexible, so we can't easily update their styling. The new articles are in our custom database and have their content fully decoupled from the styling. They're also easier to write and maintain. It's an important focus of ours to lighten our workload.

Kaj has ported XML-Starlet, a suite of XML tools that builds on LibXML2 and LibXSLT. The immediate motivation for the port was the need to process the XML files inside Open Document Format files (as used by OpenOffice and a number of other office applications). In our downloads is an installation

The current issue of Micro Mart, a weekly computer magazine in the UK, has an article about Syllable and three other alternative operating systems. It was written by Michael Reed.