After several months of work, research, and a massive platform change, The Gnu-HALO Project (formerly BSD-HALO) has finally released a proof-of-concept alpha bootable ISO to the public. It is now based very closely on SLAX Linux for the time being, and there are plans to keep software binary compatability as the project matures.

Two reviews of Mandriva One 2006. "ReviewLinux.Com takes a quick look at the new and free Mandriva One 2006 LiveCD. This review is full of pictures to show everyone the ease and use of this Linux distribution. This distribution is only one cd and perfect for anyone that maybe new to Linux." MintLinux starts: "After Ubuntu 6.06, Fedora Core 5 and SUSE 10.1 were released in the first two quarters of this year, I started to wonder about Mandriva. Was there still any reason for people to use Mandriva over Fedora, SUSE and Ubuntu? Had the distribution become outdated?"

Linux Format has a short interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman, the well-known Linux kernel hacker behind many drivers and the USB subsystem. Greg explains why drivers aren't a popular area of kernel development, how the kernel is stabilising in 2.6, and the impact of the SCO lawsuits.

"Google Spreadsheets are in the 'sneak peek' phase. The two big questions seem to be a) why would anyone want to use a potentially non-secure spreadsheet with limited capabilities, and b) how will we refer to the primitive era before online spreadsheets, which revolutionized life as we know it (which, of course, leads to a related question: what kind of silver jumpsuit is most comfortable when you're crunching numbers?)?"

The Linux kernel version 2.6.17 has been released. Not a lot of changes since the last -rc; the bulk is actually some last-minute MIPS updates and s390 futex changes, while the rest tend to be various very small fixes that trickled in over the last week. The changes are listed at KernelNewbies (don't look at me for the name).

Debian-News has assembled a lot of Ubuntu Dapper Drake reviews in one post. "This news post contains the many reviews of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu 6.06 LTS. Currently screenshot tour at OSDir and two reviews at TuxMachines, LinuxForums, ReviewLinux, Linux-watch, DesktopLinux, Nuxified, Linux.com, Tectonic, LinuxInsider, Linux.org, xbit64.net and videos at OSVids."

Putting VMware and Virtual PC to the challenge, John Tränkenschuh learns that both products have some specialties - and some drawbacks.

This is the 3rd installment in my series on deficiencies in common desktop environments. After GNOME and the Mac/MacOS, it is now KDE's turn. As with the other installments, this is a rant. Beware.

A new paper from a group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, "The Potential of the Cell Processor Scientific Computing" , explores the performance of IBM's Cell processor on some specific types of code commonly found in high-performance computing applications. The paper compare Cell's performance on these kernels to the performance of the Cray X1E, AMD Opteron, and Intel's Itanium2. The idea here is that Cell will be a commodity processor (at least that's what the authors and IBM hope), so it'll be a viable HPC alternative for the cost-sensitive academic research market. This paper represents the first formal academic attempt to decide if Cell hardware is something that researchers will want to invest in. So how does Cell stack up in comparison to these three competitors? In a word, it screams.

"Alky is a tool that allows you to convert a Windows executable to a Mac OS X or Linux binary. We are focused on high-end gaming at the moment, though we will support other applications in the future. Our binary translation layer is already working fully for OS X and Linux support is in progress. Of course, Windows applications use a very different set of libraries from Linux or OS X applications so we are also working on a library called LibAlky that will provide those Windows libraries to the application." One of the project's members is Cody Brocious, one of the developers behind PyMusique.

Red Hat has published some of the keynotes from the Red Hat Summit. "We've barely had time to unpack our suitcases, but we did manage to bring back a few party favors from this month's Red Hat Summit. Watch the keynote speeches, get updates on our announcements, and take a taste of Music City, open source style."

"The Interchange File Format (IFF) standard is widely regarded as long dead, and indeed, no one uses it anymore, except that nearly everyone uses it sometimes. Many believe the IFF standard is an Amiga graphics standard, and certainly, there have been a great many graphics files saved in the IFF format. However, IFF is not just a graphics format. It has been used for graphics, audio, text, saved games, and more. Electronic Arts actually developed the standard, back when it was a software company and not just a video game company."

The High Level Virtual Machine aims to build a common infrastructure for the development of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python, Haskell, etc.) targeting the Low Level Virtual Machine. It provides a platform agnostic virtual machine runtime, on top of LLVM, which is able to interpret, jit- or static- compile any supported language. Since all language use the same underlying VM, it's easy to achieve code and data interoperability between different languages. Version 0.1 was released June 13.

Many people who have called Apple to complain about excessive heat coming from their newly purchased computers have been told that the MacBook and the MacBook Pro are in fact Notebook computers and not Laptop computers. This article details why they are totally full of it.