The Debian Administration website gives a small tutorial in using the new desktop notification deamon included in GNOME to create simple desktop popups. "There are several times when you'll be writing a script, or a program, which needs to communicate with the desktop user and here we'll look at two of the more modern approaches."

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

This tutorial contains step-by-step instructions for installing Xen 3.0 from precompiled binaries in Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Xen lets you create guest operating systems (UNIX-like operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called 'virtual machines' or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other.

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.

"Win4Lin announced the immediate availability of their new Enterprise and SMB product, Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server. The product provides the ability to consolidate and serve multiple Windows Desktops from Linux server infrastructure. Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server allows organizations to standardize the application environment to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system - Windows, UNIX, or Linux can be used on the client, but a common application profile can be created and served from Linux server configurations such as blade servers, rack arrays or large multi-way machines."

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."

"Learning to use Vi editor could be a real pain for most people as it has a relatively steep learning curve. But once the most common commands are mastered, one gets to enjoy the sheer power of this editor made available at ones finger tips. One project which has gained a lot of popularity in the Vim community is Cream. Cream consists of a collection of scripts and plug-ins which aims to make it much easier for a new user to cut his teeth in Vim and the user can easily use most of the features of Vim which has made it the popular editor it is by just navigating the menu."

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.

At its core, OSNews is a site driven by interesting content about alternative Operating Systems. As such, we're introducing "OSNews Alternative OS Contest," a contest aimed at getting back to our roots and generating interest and publicity in alternative Operating Systems. Read on for the rules & prizes.

A lot of news on Bill Gates's stepping back. Mary Jo Foley wonders if Microsoft will still be the same after Gates has left, while also compiling a list of his 10 biggest Microsoft flops. Elsewhere, Bill Gates's successor, Craig Mundie, talks to eWeek. In addition, Cnet features an interview with both Mundie as well as Ray Ozzie: "Bill Gates leaves some pretty big shoes to fill. Think of Ray Ozzie as the left shoe and Craig Mundie as the right one."

Details have emerged this week that Microsoft may be planning to make it mandatory for laptop manufacturers who want to support its operating system to install hybrid flash drives. A Microsoft document specifying requirements for flash storage led to speculation that hybrid storage would be mandatory for all Vista laptops, from June 2007, but this has been denied by Microsoft.

GNOME 2.15.3 has been released. This is a development release, en route to GNOME 2.16, scheduled for September 2006. Release notes and download instructions are listed in the release anouncement. In the meantime, GNOME needs girls.

Monitoring your file systems and ensuring they don't fill up is a vital process in the day-to-day management of your UNIX systems. This article looks at methods for keeping an eye on disk space, discovering which files, users, or applications are using up the most space, and how to make use of quotas and other solutions to find the information you need.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server for SUN Sparc 64bit architecture. This release is an Ubuntu distribution for your servers, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, and a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default. Other packages and applications are available from a global network of mirrors, and professional, commercial technical support from Canonical Ltd and hundreds of other companies around the world."