Yesterday a new distribution of Linux that's designed for media production was released: Ubuntu Studio. Unlike the distribution it's based on, Ubuntu Studio is not a "Live CD" distro. Rather, it's designed to run close to the metal and take as much advantage of your hardware as possible. It sports an impressive list of bundled applications for audio production, graphics creation, animation, and even some video. Of course, Blender 2.43 is prominently included.

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There's going to be a new twist at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego. In addition to all of the other excellent events going on, there's going to be a intense 32-hour animation competition called FJORG! (pronounced "forge"… and, yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name).

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Coming in May of this year! From the Blender e-shop:

'Essential Blender', the next book from the Blender Foundation, is your official guide to learning the fundamentals of this open and free 3D software suite. The book can be used as a step-by-step guide for people new to Blender or new to the latest changes in Blender. This book is the ideal companion for the previous 2.3 Blender guide.

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With all of the excitement of the Blender.org's re-design, we forgot to mention that the gallery had also been updated to show new work for January. My apologies. Fortunately, a number of you did notice and made comments about it. For those of you who did not notice, those pictures are now in the Archive because the gallery been updated with February's Blender art! There's some really nice work in there for February. In particular, you might want to see that we have some nice compositing work in there and some really nice high-detail pieces. Go check it out!

Late last week, Stéphane Grabli of the Freestyle project sent an email to the Blender developer mailing list and posted an announcement on BlenderArtists.org, voicing an interest in integrating Freestyle into Blender and calling for assistance. For those of you who don't know, Freestyle is a very powerful open source non-photorealistic renderer (NPR) that's been developed as a joint research project between students at INRIA in France and MIT in the US. Below is an excerpt from his email to the Blender developers:

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