On Monday of this week, more than 60 Ubuntu developers gathered in a hotel near Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport to plan Ubuntu's next release, codenamed Edgy Eft. The goal of the meeting is to set the goals for the upcoming release and to chart the set of steps that will be necessary to implement it.

eWeek reviews Opera 9, and is full of praise: "It's a good bet that if you want to see the features that other Web browsers will be adding in a year or two, you should download Opera 9, which was released on June 20. The free Opera 9 is available in Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD and Mac OS X versions. In our tests, we found Opera 9 to be one of the best Web browsing tools we've used in a long time, which is why we are giving Opera 9 an eWEEK Labs Analyst's Choice award." They have a set of screenshots as well.

Earlier this year, Apple, after a long wait, updated its pro line of laptops by introducing the MacBook Pro, the Intel-powered equivalent of the PowerBook. MacSupport, together with Apple Netherlands, was so kind as to provide OSNews with a MacBook Pro for review purposes. Since Adam bought a MacBook Pro for himself only a few days earlier, we decided to review the machines together. Here are our findings.

Xandros has announced the immediate availability of Xandros Desktop 4. You can get the two different version from their online store. A set of screenshots is also available. "Xandros Desktop Home Edition and Xandros Desktop Home Edition - Premium provide a complete media experience on the secure, stable Xandros Linux operating system. The new products cover the digital home lifestyle spectrum with music management, wireless networking, photo management, Internet calling, DVD burning, iPod support, and more." Update: More screenshots.

"Today the growing popularity of the Internet and its inherent advantages have motivated developers and IT departments to migrate complex C/C++ business and scientific applications to a Web-based environment. XML-RPC is a perfect mechanism to integrate existing C/C++ programs with other client-side technologies. This article is a step-by-step guide to exposing C++ methods as services. It includes sample code snippets for C++ integration using an open source XML-RPC Library."

"Learn how IBM DB2 9 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows exploits multiple page sizes. With the introduction of the POWER5+ processor architecture, the IBM AIX 5L operating system added support for a new 64-kilobyte page with properties that are similar to the current default 4-kilobyte pages. In addition, AIX 5L Version 5.3 TL04 also introduced a new 16-gigabyte huge-page feature for this hardware architecture. DB2 9 automatically exploits the 64-kilobyte pages to deliver high performance for database applications on this platform. In addition, DB2 also supports the enablement of 16-gigabyte huge pages."

Users of Microsoft Office can now choose one of the Creative Commons licenses for work created in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works, partnered with 3sharp LLC to develop and test this new copyright licensing tool, known as the Creative Commons add-in for Microsoft Office.

Magnussoft has announced a delay of a month for Zeta 1.21, a bugfix release of the Zeta operating system. The extra month will be used to improve Firefox and Seamonkey, as well as working on the driver situation.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday released the second beta of Java 6, the company's next-generation development language targeted at so-called Web 2.0 programmers. Perhaps most enticing for those new to Java, the update adds a framework for supporting popular scripting languages such as PHP.

"The Fedora Project announces the first release of the Fedora Core 6 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and ppc/ppc64 architectures, including Intel based Macintosh computers." This test release includes KDE 3.5.3, GNOME 2.15, a new printing system, and much more. Check the release schedule for, well, release schedule information; downloads are available in .torrent and 'ordinary' .iso. Update: Screenshots.

"This list is compiled from a variety of sources and is intended for anyone who wishes to find centralized reading material about Eclipse. One of the biggest challenges new Eclipse users face is where to find the right information for a task. This article provides a small step in solving that problem."

In reponse to several inquiries, we are extending the deadline of our Alternative OS Contest. The original deadline for entries was this Thursday, however, to allow more time for experimentation and writing, we are extending the deadline to Friday, July 14th. So fire up those download managers, grab yourself an ISO, and join the action!

Microsoft Australia's Office chief today delivered a frank retrospective on how badly bloated Office had become over the years. Speaking at a briefing to journalists about Windows Vista and Office 2007, Wilkinson launched into a lengthy and frank retrospective on how Office came to be as bloated as it is today. "Little point changes to our user interface design weren't helping the problem. The real problem was the application had increased too much in complexity."

The AROS team posted its latest monthly update. Foremost, a new version of the hosted AROS-PPC has been released: "This release depends on glibc 2.3.2 or newer. You need to give AROS some more RAM than the default allocation of 16 MB (leaves about 4 MB for applications). Start it using: ./aros -m 64 This will allocate 64 MB. As with all X11 hosted AROS versions you need to add Option "BackingStore" to the Device section of xorg.conf." The other news is that the website has been translated to German.