"What is the world's most widely used operating system?" The answer is in an interesting Linux Insider piece about ITRON, 'a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems' that runs on a lot of "mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and other electronic devices."

PC-BSD 1.2 has been released. "PC-BSD software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD 1.2 for x86 based processors. PC-BSD 1.2 now utilizes the FreeBSD advanced ULE scheduler and is compiled with optimizations for 686 processors (all support for 386, 486 and 586 microcode is disabled in kernel). This release of PC-BSD ushers in a new era of stability and simplicity for desktop operating systems based on UNIX, making it a solid release for home and business usage."

"We're glad to announce SUSE Linux 10.2 Codename 'Basilisk Lizard' Alpha2. It's downloadable from today on and will be the last community/consumer distribution called SUSE Linux. We'll rename SUSE Linux into openSUSE." And the release announcement lists some changes, with a referral to CD1, where the changelog can be found. And there was much rejoicing. No, really.

eWEEK Labs' tests show that Beta 1 of the open-source Firefox 2.0 includes some welcome new features, catches up a bit with capabilities found in other Web browsers and adds some nice security enhancements. However, while Firefox 2.0 is shaping up to be a good upgrade to Version 1.5 of the popular Web browser, it doesn't look like it will be the slam-dunk over the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 that Firefox 1.5 has been to the current IE 6.x. For that matter, unless Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 improve greatly before their respective releases later in 2006, neither will come close to topping the quality of the already shipping Opera 9.

Researchers at Microsoft are working on an ambitious new project to hunt down and neutralize large-scale search engine spammers. The software giant's Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group has taken the wraps off Strider Search Defender, an experimental project that automates the discovery of search spammers through non-content analysis.

DROPS is the educational operating system of the Dresden University of Technology, Germany (TU-Dresden). Its name is an acronym for Dresden Real-Time Operating System, which reveals its strongest feature, it is real-time capable and it is designed with security in mind. Its homepage can be found here. Note: This is the 4th entry to our Alternative OS Contest which runs through 14th July!

When organising the 3rd international GPLv3 conference, FSFE got the whole 2 days recorded and have now put the video and audio files online. There are also full transcripts, including the Q and A sessions of Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.

From the beginning, Eclipse included tight integration with the Concurrent Versions System in order to provide access to change-management capabilities. Now, many projects - notably those run by the Apache Software Foundation - are using a different change-management system: Subversion. This article demonstrates how to add Subversion support to Eclipse and how to perform basic version-control activities from the IDE.

In this second article of a two-part series, we demonstrate TurboGears, another open source MVC-style Web application framework based on Python. This article shows how to use TurboGears to create a Web-based shopping application and concludes with a comparison between Turbogears and Django.

The Debian GNU/Linux project today admitted a hacker had compromised one of its internal servers. "Early this morning we discovered that someone had managed to compromise gluck.debian.org," Debian developer James Troup wrote in an e-mail to the Debian community. "We've taken the machine offline and are preparing to reinstall it," Troup continued, noting a number of key services were currently offline as a result.

Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 1 has been released. This milestone for developers and testers includes several new features including anti-phishing, browser session restore in case of a crash, support for client-side session and persistent storage, ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs, support for JavaScript 1.7, new Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, new microsummaries feature for bookmarks, new search plugin manager and better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds. Screenshots documenting the new features can be found here.

Symbian Limited has just announced a new version of its very widely used operating system for smartphones. The most significant new features in Symbian OS 9.3 are native support for Wi-Fi wireless networking and USB 2.0 on-the-go. It also offers shorter start-up times for phones and key applications as well as improved memory management, resulting in more responsive devices. For the most part, though, Symbian OS 9.3 is an incremental upgrade to the previous version with no major improvements.

We bring to you an interview with Alvaro J. Iradier, founder and lead developer of AMSN (Alvaro's Messenger), a full-featured MSN compatible client, written in tcl/tk.

"Microsoft alerted us this time about seven vulnerabilities of which five were rated critical and two important. There are vulnerabilities in the Server service, the DHCP Client service, Excel and Office that could allow remote code execution."