What makes a Mono developer tick? Linux format has a brief interview with Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein, two prominent Mono coders who've just written a book on the open source .NET implementation. They explain the advantages of C# over other languages, and give a bit of advice for budding Mono app developers.

"The Fedora distribution is one of the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Although non-users sometimes dismiss it as too mainstream to be of interest, those familiar with it appreciate that it uses only free software and showcases the latest programs. Fedora Core 5 (FC5) is slated for release next week." Read more of the preview here. Elsewhere, Christopher Blizzard of Red Hat blogs about modifying Fedora to fit into the OLPC project needs and the optimization work being done on Fedora as a result of it using Red Hat open sourced tools like Dogtail.

"In the GNOME philosophy, we want applications that do their job, only their job, and we want those to do it perfectly. Epiphany's job is to browse the web. Only browsing the web. But browsing the web in a GNOME fashioned way." Read more here and also here.

"Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) for Spring 2006 has a rather obvious focus: the announcement of Intel's next generation microarchitecture. Intel’s new core will almost certainly leapfrog arch-rival AMD for integer and commercial computing performance. That alone should make this IDF one of the most exciting in the last several years."

On Monday, Microsoft updated the four-month-old Beta 1 version of Microsoft Office 2007 with a "Technical Refresh" version. Office has shed the preliminary name "Microsoft Office 12" for its final name, Microsoft Office 2007, and sports an improved version of the new ribbon interface. This Technical Refresh represents the first version of Office 2007 to run under Windows Vista.

People love screenshots. It's probably because humans are a very visually orientated species. When it comes to software, people claim to be able to judge entire products, just by looking at a few screenshots. Especially for those people: 85 screenshots of Haiku running all sorts of applications. For the people who've been living under a rock the past 5 years: Haiku is an attempt to recreate BeOS as an open source product. And for the people who don't know BeOS-- click here.

"In twenty odd years of working with computers, I never owned an Apple computer. Frankly, until OSX, I was never interested. But the BSD underpinnings of OSX got my attention. The Mac finally got a "real" operating system. It was interesting enough that several years after it debuted, I purchased my first Apple computer on eBay, a Mac Mini, to dig a little deeper into the OS. Not only did Apple do something right with OSX, but it was smart marketing to introduce a cheap Mac that worked with PC hardware. It is squarely aimed at Windows switchers and the mildly curious like myself. I would never have considered springing for a full-blown iMac or iBook as a learning exercise, but a used Mini fit the budget."

As part of its monthly patch cycle, Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for six security holes in Office and one flaw in Windows. Five of the six vulnerabilities in Office are specific to Excel. The most serious flaws could allow an attacker to gain control over a vulnerable PC running the spreadsheet program, Microsoft said in Security Bulletin MS06-012. In all cases, the miscreant would have to persuade the user to open a malformed Excel file, the software maker said. The sixth problem affects a range of Office applications, including some versions of Word, Outlook & PowerPoint. Microsoft's second update deals with an operating system issue that affects Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003.

Apple on Monday released the second set of Mac OS X security fixes in two weeks. Security Update 2006-002 corrects problems caused by the company's previous patch and fixes newly discovered security flaws, some of which could let an attacker run code on a computer with the same privileges as the user, the company said on its web site.

Better late than never: "With more than 1500 improvements since the first beta release of the 1.5 series, the KOffice developers invite the user community for the final round of testing of KOffice 1.5 before the first release candidate. Read the full announcement, the changelog, download the release, and give it some real world testing for us!"

The web was abuzz the last few days because of a set of photos on Flickr that allegedly showed the progress of Windows XP being installed on an Intel iMac. Many questioned the photos' authenticity, but it now appears they might have been real after all. A person by the name of 'narf2006' has been hacking away for weeks, and the organizer of the WinXP on Mac contest has taken down the forum on which one had to post the proof and instructions.

"This is the year... The year that Microsoft releases the newest version of Windows. We are targeting to make Windows Vista generally available in the second half of this year, and the exact delivery date will ultimately be determined by the quality of the product. So what is so compelling that our customers would want to spend money upgrading to the Vista operating system? Let’s take a quick look at all that Vista offers a small business."

Cutlets reviews PCLinuxOS and concludes: "PCLinuxOS is an extremely easy to use, user friendly distribution that is perfect for Joe and Jane users from the Windows world. The developers have taken the utmost care to ensure that the distribution functions perfectly and that it meets the needs of a large section of Linux users. The out of the box support for non-free formats is a huge plus for this distribution."

Talk of an imminent sale of Sun to Google has been swirling around trading floors and Silicon Valley for more than a week. Shares of Sun, which has a partnership with Google to develop and distribute each other’s technology, spiked up about 4 percent last week as a result of the rumors. The speculation got even more legs after Google purchased Writely, a maker of a web-based word processor that some people viewed as a product to be added to Sun’s StarOffice suite, which Google may help distribute. It’s also convenient that Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, is the former chief technology officer of Sun.