PC-BSD achieved a milestone recently with the release of their first stable version, 1.0, as reported by OSNews earlier. Two members of the PC-BSD team, founder and developer, Kris Moore, and language co-ordinator and contributor Charles-Andre Landemaine, have been interviewed for this release.

GNU/DOS 2006 SR1 was released today. It features various minor updates and bug fixes. Also, due to popular demand, the installation CD is now bootable. Download it here. GNU/DOS is a distribution of FreeDOS with various packages included, such as the OpenGEM GUI, a webbrowser and email client, the VIM editor, and much more.

Kevin Carmony has taken the heat from some in the FOSS community for offering non-free software in Linspire, and in particular, for attempting to lure the FOSS community into contributing to Linspire via Freespire. Don Parris spoke with Linspire's Kevin Carmony to learn more about his position. Are the community's accusations fair? What other options are there?

"CUPS 1.2.0 is the first stable feature release in the 1.2.x series and includes over 90 new features and changes since CUPS 1.1.23, including a greatly improved web interface and 'plug-and-print' support for many local and network printers. For a complete list of changes and new features, please consult the 'What's New in CUPS 1.2' document."

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE. This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. These include: Addition of a keyboard multiplexer. This allows USB and PS/2 keyboards to coexist without any special options at boot. Many fixes for filesystem stability. High load stress tests are now run successfully on a regular basis as part of the normal FreeBSD QA process. Automatic configuration for man Bluetooth devices, as well as automatic support for running WiFi access points. Addition of drivers for new ethernet and SAS and SATA RAID controllers."

Microsoft used the annual Mobile & Embedded DevCon to announce the availability of a beta release of Windows CE 6, the next generation of its real-time software used to build customized operating systems for devices such as internet protocol set-top-boxes, Global Positioning System-based devices, and industrial automation and medical devices. With a redesigned operating system kernel architecture, expanded capacity for simultaneous processes (up to 32000) and newly integrated tool set, Windows CE 6 promises help device makers more quickly create devices that support a range of applications for high-demand categories.

News reports out of LinuxTag late last week have Andrew Morton, the second highest ranking Linux kernel developer, calling for a bug-fixing cycle to cut down on the growing number of bugs found in the latest kernel release. NewsForge contacted the number one man on the Linux project, Linus Torvalds, who acknowledged it might be the right time for a "bug cycle".

"New security features in Windows Vista will largely eliminate the need to run separate antispyware or firewall software, according to a new analyst report. Due out early next year, the next major release of Microsoft's flagship operating system promises not only to increase security for consumers, it will also dramatically affect the $3.6 billion market for Windows security products, according to a Yankee Group report scheduled to be published Monday." That same report also claims that Vista's security measures will hurt in the enterprise sector, and it advises companies to stick with XP SP2 until 2008.

At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

Silicon Graphics Inc. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The press release sugarcoats: "Silicon Graphics today announced that it has reached an agreement with all of its Senior Secured bank lenders and with holders of a significant amount of its Senior Secured debt on the terms of a reorganization plan that will reduce its debt by approximately $250 million, greatly simplifying its capital structure." El Reg, The Inq, and the WSJ have more.

"Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will next month show off the ready-to-market version of a hybrid hard drive which can greatly reduce boot-up time of laptops and desktop PCs. The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC."

After making your own up-to-date Fedora install DVD, "creating a yum repo for installing FC5, prepatched, via the network, is also fairly simple. And makes a lot of sense for anyone supporting a Fedora-based environment."

"The Ubuntu team is proud to present the Flight 7 release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support). With Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Flight 7 comes many bug fixes, general fixes all around, new version of some key applications and much more. Note: This is still a development release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in June of 2006." Kubuntu and Xubuntu versions have been released as well.

A key consideration in adopting an iterative process is selecting how long your iterations will be. Mike Cohn discusses the issues to consider when determining whether your team's iterations should last two weeks, three weeks, or longer.