Trolltech will ship an "open" Linux-based phone in September. The "Greenphone" features a user-modifiable Linux OS, and is meant to jumpstart a third-party native application ecosystem for Linux-based mobile phones.

The long development process of Slackware Linux 11.0 is about to conclude - that's according to Patrick Volkerding who has declared the "current" tree as RC1: "There are still a few changes yet to happen, but let's call this Slackware 11.0 release candidate 1." Other recent changes include upgrade to stable kernel 2.4.33; upgrade to udev 097, and rebuild of glibc 2.3.6 for both 2.4.33 and 2.6.16.27 kernels. Update: Screenshots.

Windows INI files and its registry have both advantages and limitations, particularly from a developer's viewpoint. In this DevSource article, Peter Aitken explains what they are, and explains how .NET's isolated storage works: it provides a location on your drive that only a specific application can find and use. He explains when isolated storage is a developer's best friend, and when you shouldn't bother.

OneStat today reported that Microsoft's Windows dominates the operating system market with a global usage share of 96.97 percent. The Mac appears to be at around 2.47% and Linux at 0.36%. Please note that OneStat bases its numbers on a large number of internet site hits and extraction from user agents.

ReactOS has just released version 0.3.0 RC2 of their open source Microsoft Windows-compatible operating system. They are also now 94% finished with the code audit.

Every skilled trade has its secrets -- those little tricks, techniques, and tools that make light of even the most complex task. Programmers, system administrators, and other UNIX computer professionals have their own kind of specialized tools. Learn how to leverage the many shortcuts that the UNIX shell provides. With a little practice, you'll work smarter, not harder.

Debian is a steadfastly noncommercial version of Linux. But Hewlett-Packard will give it a big corporate hug Monday with the announcement of a plan to provide support for the open-source operating system.

Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express targetting the XBOX 360 will democratize game development by delivering the necessary tools to hobbyists, students, indie developers and studios alike to help them bring their creative game ideas to life while nurturing game development talent, collaboration and sharing that will benefit the entire industry.

"DirectX 10 is likely to see a number of point revisions during its lifespan and the first of these, imaginatively titled DirectX 10.1, will be the first of these. It may surprise some of you reading this, but the features which will be added by DirectX 10.1 have already been decided upon and information made available about them, so in this article we'll be taking a look through what we can expect to see in DirectX 10.1 compliant hardware."

" a new white paper by VMWare that comes to the surprising conclusion that hardware-assisted x86 virtualization oftentimes fails to outperform software-assisted virtualization. My reading of the paper says that this counterintuitive result is often due to the fact that hardware-assisted virtualization relies on expensive traps to catch privileged instructions while software-assisted virtualization uses inexpensive software substitutions." Read more at Slashdot.

This chapter explains the ins and outs of non-standard FreeBSD installations. If you are installing FreeBSD on a system with another operating system previously installed, or if you aren't using a CD or DVD to install FreeBSD, you'll want to read this chapter before performing the installation.

NetBeans IDE provides a wide variety of tools to support Java application development, but it is the Source Editor where you will spend most of your time. Given that fact, a lot of attention has been put into features and subtle touches to make coding faster and more pleasurable. This chapter covers the ins and outs of the Source Editor.

The driver source code released for the Intel 965 Graphics chipset recently isn't as open as first thought. Keith Packard posted a reply on the linux-kernel mailing list detailing what parts were not available.

"Debian and Ubuntu. Ubuntu and Debian. How are they different? How are they the same? Well, most of the differences lie in the target userbase of the OSes. Debian is attempting the unattemptable by making a distro that's right for almost every use imaginable. Servers use it, workstations use it, monkeys I'm sure could use it too. That comes at a price." More here.