Learn Objective-C with Xcode in the new free PDF book from Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin. Jump into Cocoa Development with some ready made classes and example code for XCode 2.0 and above. The book starts from scratch with basic programming knowlegde and ends up in the depth of Objective-C and Cocoa.

Solaris Express 3/06 was released today. This is build 33 of Nevada. Various additions have been made, as well as the general slew of bug fixes. There is an .iso image for DVD available for download as well.

The Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) is a new Eclipse project devoted to providing an open source framework supporting the creation of communications-based applications on the Eclipse platform. This article gives gives you a quick glimpse into ECF and an example that demonstrated one of the many capabilities the framework provides, and its future direction.

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.

"Duval details his side of the story: "Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva 'thanks me' and I'm leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It's difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva's CEO called to tell me that I was leaving." Mandriva's CEO replies: "Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off."

"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."

The 8th beta of OpenSUSE 10.1 has been released today. As has become common now, the OpenSUSE team did not post any changelog, sadly. There's a list of most annoying bugs, and the download locations are listed inside the release announcement.

"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?"

FreeDarwin is a project started to create a BSD-like OS based on Apple Darwin. It uses the NetBSD pkgsrc system, and hopes to replace the DarwinBuild build system with a BSD like build system for the base system, as well as replace many of the Apple and GNU userland tools with BSD userland tools. The first pre-release was released today.

"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?"

Two former user interface designers at Apple and Microsoft - now co-workers at Frog Design - come together to discuss the design considerations that have gone into Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

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.

The director of platform strategy at Microsoft, Bill Hilf has lead the Linux and open source software technology group at Redmond for the past two years and formerly headed the global Linux technical strategy of IBM. He says reliability and predicability are the key factors which give Microsoft’s software the edge over Linux and open source alternatives.

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.