Many Fedora users are anxiously waiting for the Fedora Core 5 release, scheduled for Monday, March 20. Be warned that some of you may have to wait a little longer, however: the kernel shipped with FC5 effectively disallows the loading of any non-GPL modules. That behavior was a mistake, and a fix has already been made, but it is too late to get that fix into the initial FC5 release. So binary module users will want to wait until the first errata kernel is released (a few days, at most) before upgrading. Update: Elsewhere, an interview with Greg DeKoenigsberg who presently serves as Red Hat's Community Relations Manager and is on the Fedora Extras Steering Committee.

A very detailed how to for installing and running Windows XP on an Intel iMac have been posted on the contest website. And on a related note, someone who almost won the contest posted his findings too: "While I’m disappointed not to have won, I’m encouraged to see that our approaches were remarkably similar. We both wrote custom EFI CSM drivers to emulate the BIOS functions Windows requires to boot. I’m very curious how they managed to get VGA working, and I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t work in either the Mini or the Macbook Pro, as it looks like they did all their development on an iMac."

"The latest Community Technology Preview version of Windows Vista contains a new feature aimed at helping the average Joe and his friendly Best Buy shopping assistant figure out what kind of horsepower is needed to run the new OS. The rating consists of an aggregate total rating on a scale from 1 to 5 and a number of sub-ratings on a scale yet to be specified, broken out by hardware categories like processor, memory, video card, and hard drive."

Freely available RiscPC hardware emulator RPCEmu has been ported to Linux. Author Tom Walker released his program under an open source licence to Peter Naulls, who then crafted a Linux version and added in HostFS support from ArcEm - enabling RPCEmu to access files stored by the host operating system. RPCEmu, originally built for Windows users, is distributed with its source code included for other programmers to tweak and experiment with.

"There are several possible reasons why you might choose to use the command line interface as your desktop environment. For one thing, it uses less electricity, so you could maximize battery life on your laptop computer. Secondly, it forces you to think about your operating system and directory structure in a totally different way than a GUI does; this could greatly enhance your understanding of GNU/Linux and cause you to be more creative in your technological problem solving. And thirdly, everyone will think you're a supreme computer genius for ditching X11 for the CLI. People passing by your desk will think you're some kind of computer god. Who doesn't want that?"

"Hey, have you been thinking about developing for Microsoft's new form factor PC called the Ultra Mobile PC aka Origami, but don't know where to go? As I mentioned in the meeting last night, the folks over at MSDN have got some great information here and they even have an emulator to get you started on your way to tailor your apps to the 7" UMPC interface."

"3D acceleration is a long established standard part of today’s systems yet it started life as an exotic, expensive add on. Last year Ageia announced a new kind of add on, their PhysX chip is a new technology specifically designed for accelerating physics processing in games. Why should a physics chip interest gamers? What does it do? How does it work?"

As we reported a few days ago, the Windows XP on Mac contest has been won by 'narf2006'. The contest website says that a solution has been found and tested to work. A video of Windows XP booting can also be found.

This article presents results of an investigation of the usage of .NET on five versions of Windows. The operating system files for the first version of Windows tested, XP Pro with Service Pack 2 applied, did not use .NET at all. This is understandable because XP was released before .NET was first released. The next version of Windows was the PDC 2003 build of Longhorn. This has a similar number of unmanaged executable files as XPSP2 but it also had thirty five .NET assemblies. Amongst these assemblies were two services.

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.14, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform Free desktop environment. Foresight Linux 0.9.4 was first to incorporate GNOME 2.14 on their distribution, VMWare and Qemu images are already available in addition to their normal distribution.

Ever get tired of reading your news about BSD? Try BSDTalk then. So far they got about 20/10 minute podcasts regarding BSD related news and info.

Sometimes an app isn't there for your architecture. This happens now and then for AMD64. It can be handy to chroot into x86 and symlink to the x86 app afterwards. Also, despite Ubuntu's stability, catastrophic failures do happen, and when they do it is important to have a backup so that your data can be recovered. This HowTo goes over creating an image of your installation so that you can restore your system if needed with all the programs and updates already installed. Elsewhere, Kubuntu Flight 5 was released.

Team System posted a tutorial on how to install and configure Subversion under Windows, while this article describes how to create both the repository and your projects while running on Windows or Linux.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA4 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA4. A couple of significant changes were made to 6.1-BETA4. First is a large set of fixes to the VFS layer and various filesystems that should significantly help performance under heavy load and also fix problems with forcefully unmounting these filesystems. The second large change is that sysinstall will now install both the GENERIC and SMP kernels and automatically select the appropriate one based on whether it detects one CPU in the system or multiple CPUs.