"We are pleased to announce that the first public beta release of Xubuntu, the latest official addition to the Ubuntu family of derivative distributions has arrived. Xubuntu is built around the solid Ubuntu core and the friendly and relatively lightweight Xfce desktop environment, with the specific goal of providing a nice user experience even on older hardware." Screenshots o'plenty, boys and girls.

More than a dozen technology companies, including IBM, Red Hat, and Novell are planning to support a new integrated server and desktop Linux standard unveiled at next week's Linux Desktop Summit by the Free Standards Group. The FSG is a nonprofit organization that has worked for years on a number of open standards including a server specification called the Linux Standard Base.

"In this article, we’ll look at the internals of VFS file system and how it functions. VFS came into picture when BSD implemented VFS for NFS with an aim of dispatching or getting rid of different file systems. Before delving further in the topic, let’s define the necessary terms we need to know before understanding the concept."

Apple Computer faced tough questioning Thursday in its bid to gain access to electronic records of Mac enthusiast sites that published leaked details of an unreleased product. Although a lower court ruled last year that Apple should be able to gain access to electronic records of the enthusiast sites, a three-judge appeals panel in the State of California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District, peppered Apple's lawyer with questions. The judges wanted to know whether the information at issue represented a genuine trade secret as well as whether journalists' right to protect their sources outweigh Apple's right to protect its trade secrets.

DesktopLinux reviews SUSE 10.1 RC1. "This is one really, really cool and solid distribution. OK, before I go any further I should point out that SUSE 10.1 isn't actually released yet. I've been kicking the tires of the first SUSE 10.1 'Release Candidate'."

"The Ubuntu team is proud to present the beta release of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). With Ubuntu 6.06 Beta comes loads of bug fixes, a new look-and-feel, a new live-CD installer, GNOME 2.14.1, and much more." You can download it as both live-CD and install CD, and as always, available for x86, x86-64, and PowerPC.

The Mac Observer has six different articles on Apple's Q2 financial results. First time buyers are up 50%, while Apple says the interest in Boot Camp is high. Apple reported a revenue of $4.3 billion, strong iPod sales, and 40 new Apple Stores in 2006. However, pro users are hesitating on buying new Macs because they are waiting for Microsoft's and Adobe's universal binaries.

LLVM 1.7 has been released. "This release contains a completely rewritten llvm-gcc (based on GCC 4.0.1), a brand new SPARC backend, supports GCC-style generic vectors, supports SSE and Altivec intrinsics, support for Objective C/C++, the X86 backend generates much better code and can produce Scalar SSE code, this release has initial DWARF debugging support, includes a new llvm-config utility, has initial support for GCC-style inline assembly, and includes many target-independent code generator and optimizer improvements."

"I still remember the day very clearly. It was Monday, October 27, 2003. Several thousand developers - and, let's face it, quite a few garden variety Windows enthusiasts - charged into Hall A at the Los Angeles Convention Center like teenage girls at a Justin Timberlake concert, volleying for the best seats. I've been to more Bill Gates keynotes than I can count, and this was the first time I ever saw anyone climb over other people in order to secure a better view (no offense to Mr. Gates, but he's not exactly a dynamic speaker). It was PDC 2003 and everything was right with my world." Read more of the editorial here.

After more than 5 million downloads, Microsoft has decided to extend its free Visual Studio Express downloads indefinitely. In related news, they are running a contest too.

This tutorial shows you how to move an application from a conventional JSP, Eclipse design to one based on Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology. It will guide you through the development of a small human-resources application, first using conventional JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Eclipse, and then migrating it to a highly interactive solution using Ajax.

"Sometimes we don't really see what our eyes are viewing. That's true with your computer screen, and it's true in nature as well. Oh sure, we can say what we think we're seeing, but we're missing the big story such as the man behind the curtain, to recall a famous phrase from an even more beloved movie." Read the article here.

Andrey Savochkin leads the development of the kernel portion of OpenVZ, an operating system-level server virtualization solution. In an interview on KernelTrap, Andrey offers a thorough explanation of what virtualization is and how it works. He also discusses the differences between hardware-level and operating system-level virtualization, going on to compare OpenVZ to VServer, Xen and UserMode Linux.

Efforts to bring glitzy new graphics to Linux are fueling an old conflict: Does proprietary software belong in open-source Linux? The issue involves software modules called drivers, which plug into the kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system. Drivers let software communicate with hardware such as network adapters, hard drives and video cards.