"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.

"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.

"Within the past two years, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have all released freely available versions of their flagship database servers, a move that would have been unheard of just a few years ago. While their respective representatives would argue the move was made in order to better accommodate the needs of all users, it's fairly clear that continued pressure from open source alternatives such as MySQL and PostgreSQL have caused these database juggernauts to rethink their strategies within this increasingly competitive market."

"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."

"The PS3’s hard drive 'will be 60GB big, be completely upgradeable, and support Linux OS' plus 'will act as a home server and allow users to store various forms of media to be pulled up elsewhere.' It hasn't yet been made clear if all PS3 systems will come bundled with a hard drive. SPOnG expects that this will be the case, and we will be very surprised otherwise, but watch this space for confirmation."

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.

Red Hat announced several moves Tuesday to bring virtualization technology to the mainstream Linux market by the end of the year, a move that the company promises will dramatically increase server efficiency. The company already has promised to include a major virtualization component, the Xen hypervisor software, in its next premium product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5, due by the end of the year.