We are pleased to announce that our donate to download experiment was a great sucess overall though we have learned to have a more robust infrastructure in place for the next release.  We had expected to bring in around $50 to put towards a new development system but ended up bringing in $470.09 USD in six days at $0.66 per person after paypal fees.  I will hopefully be acquiring the new dev system this weekend.

Due to the great response we received we decided to open up the free download links today, a day earlier than planned.  The links are now available on our downloads page.  Thank you everyone for making this experiment in open source fundraising such a great sucess!

I am pleased to say that we now have a stable and well seeded torrent in place and that is relieving the stress on our primary download server.  We are continuing to try and get additional DirectDownload mirrors up and going.

Thanks

We have had an overwhelming response to our $1 donation to download experiment.  So overwhelming in fact that our server can not keep up.  I am spending today doing my very best to locate and set up additional mirrors.

To those of you who made a donation but have been unable to dowload the ISO due to the slowness of the server we apologize and hope to have this problem corrected soon.  We will certainly know to have a much better infrastructure in place for our next release before making it available.  If you have been unable to download and would like us to, we are happy to refund your $1 via paypal.  This experiement was never intended to leave anyone unhappy and that is the last thing we intend to do.  If  you would like a refund please email me with your paypal email address and the subject “refund” at project@symphonyos.com.  Those who wish to bear with us will see new download links added today.

The SymphonyOS Project is pleased to announce the release of SymphonyOne 2008.1, our first major release in almost a year. SymphonyOne is an almost 100% rewrite of all the Mezzo desktop code taking advantage of more features of fvwm to provide a smaller footprint and more stable environment. Based on Ubuntu 7.10, SymphonyOne provides a complete desktop environment and full Ubuntu compatibility on systems with as little as a 200mhz processor. SymphonyOne also introduces our new WebApps system which allows you to make any website into a program in your programs menu which runs as it’s own process in it’s own window. Some of the key features of SymphonyOne 2008.1 include:

• Based on ubuntu 7.10 with all the latest updates.
• Compatible with all Ubuntu packages
• Ubiquity installer (same as ubuntu)
• Completely rewritten Mezzo Desktop (Mezzo v.2) implemented using more features of FVWM giving it a lighter footprint
• System management by Gnome-System-Tools (network, display, users, etc.)
• NEW - Web App System (similar to Mozilla Prizm but implemented in Orchestra and fully integrated into the system). Inside firefox there is a button (bookmarklet) that when clicked takes you to a wizard that allows you to make the current page a web app. Web apps are displayed in the programs menu like any other program, using the favicon.ico from the site in question as it’s icon. When launched, the web app is run in it’s own window seperately from firefox.
• NEW - With the changes in the Mezzo desktop we have thrown away our old desklet system which was never really adopted by developers and have moved to adesklets in this release.

SymphonyOne 2008.1 is now availble on CD-ROM via On-Disk.com, the exclusive CD provider for the SymphonyOS project for USD$9.99 and via Direct Download for a donation of USD $1.00. On April 18, 2008 we will remove the donation requirement for direct download as well as making additional mirrors and bittorrent options available. We are offering this early download option as an experiment in open source project fundraising and in order to fund the purchase of a new development machine (the current version was built on one partition of a three year old 1.3 ghz Celeron laptop which slowed the development process down considerably). If you are a member of the press, open source blogger, educator, or have another reason you cannot make the USD $1 donation please email project@symphonyos.com and we will do our best to make arrangements for a free download option.

SymphonyOne, slated for release later this week provides a refreshed Mezzo interface with faster than ever responses and is stable and feature rich enough to use every day.

We are pleased to announce SymphonyOne.  SymphonyOne is a leaner meaner version of SymphonyOS built with a much smaller memory footprint than the standard SymphonyOS and with improved stability. SymphonyOne will leverage additional benefits of the window manager used in SymphonyOS (FVWM) to provide faster loading corner targets and an overall faster desktop experience.

The SymphonyOne Desktop is currently in a closed alpha test and we expect to release the first preview version within the next week.  We would like to take this opprotuity to thank those that have stayed with the project over the last year and hope they will continue to help us move SymphonyOS forward in the years to come.

I am pleased to announce the reopening of the SymphonyOS user community. After a long absence the forums are now again open. If you had an account on our old forums you will need to re-register in order to participate.

The new community forums can be found here.

Thanks!