"Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way. Dell has started advertising a trio of affordable workstations with RHEL WS 4 preinstalled."

"Perl for zOS is a statically-linked, pre-compiled port of the Perl (Version 5.8.7) scripting language to the z/OS UNIX platform with all known defects resolved. This new porti of Perl 5.8.7 provides a pre-built version of Perl with a dedicated support team to address new problems that may arise."

"SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows is deadly simple to install and manage, with extended virtual servers' centralized management features, and enhanced provisioning capabilities. Anyway you should consider that OS partitioning is different from virtualization. Virtuozzo is less flexible than any VMware or Microsoft virtualization software and you won't be able to consolidate different platforms, or migrate some of them when the new Microsoft codename Longhorn Server will come."

The second (beta) version of the TriangleOS' web service, now called Qikx, is online now. Next to providing an online organise/search engine to store, order and share all kinds of content, the goal of the system is to eventually integrate web-storage, publishing and mail interfaces into the OS. Progress has also been made on the OS part, the VFDBS (filesystem), which can now query and read from online VFDBS-disks (such as Qikx). More information and screenshots at the TriangleOS website.

Ten years ago, on 24 February 1996, Greg Lehey submitted for publication the final version of the first ever book on the FreeBSD operating system, "Installing and Using FreeBSD". It was later renamed to "The Complete FreeBSD", as is now known and appreciated by the users of this OS. Grog have always retained full rights to the book, and for today he has decided to release it for download under a Creative Commons license. Besides, he doesn't have the time to keep updating it, so he is asking for help. He can't guarantee money, "just" recognition in the preface.

"uBrowser is a simple web browser that illustrates one way of embedding the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine into a standalone application using LibXUL. In this case, the contents of the page is grabbed as it's being rendered and displayed as a texture on some geometry using OpenGL. You are able to interact with the page (mostly) normally and visit (almost) any site that works correctly with Firefox 1.5."

"Most Linux people don't know much about JBoss, the open source firm reported in talks with Oracle about a $400 million purchase. That tops any free software deals I can recall. Novell paid $210 million for SUSE in cash. So, what about this JBoss company? They did it without any initial outside funding, generated revenue and self-funded and stayed true to open source 100% while selling services."

"The KDE desktop of SUSE Linux 10.1 (and the future enterprise products built on it) will contain a KDE frontend for Beagle called Kerry. For this Beagle has been split into non-GUI and GUI parts, some backends are now in sub-packages (Evolution, Firefox) and the libbeagle API has been improved in parts. Besides generic file indexing Beagle already contains backends written by Debajyoti Bera and others for KMail, Kopete, and Konqueror's web history cache."

David Reveman of Novell shares his thoughts on Xgl, Metacity, and more."I've been getting a lot of mail from people asking me about my thoughts on AIGLX, the GL compositing work being done on Metacity and nVidia's xdevconf paper. Instead of replying to everyone individually, I though I'd send a mail to the Xorg list."

The MorphOS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an updated MorphOS version for Amiga computers equipped with PowerUP accelerator cards. Some of the included changes are improved graphics hardware compatability (drivers for the popular Cybervision64, Cybervision 64/3D and Picasso IV cards), a bugfix for machines with more than 128MB of memory installed, an experimental version of a 4IDE driver, and new Hungarian language support. You can read the changelog, and follow the download instructions.

One week after releasing Mac OS X 10.4.5 to the general public Apple has dropped the first seed of the next Mac OS X update on developers. The update currently delivers about 50 documented improvements, including several OpenGL-related fixes, improvements to CoreImage and CoreGraphics, and other bug corrections for iSync, AppleScript, and other components.

Ok, this one is just plain scary. "By combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found an exotic way of determining an answer to an algorithm - without ever running the algorithm. Using an optical-based quantum computer, a research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat has presented the first demonstration of 'counterfactual computation', inferring information about an answer, even though the computer did not run." The research team published their results in Nature.

Apple has phased out its 15" PowerBook G4. The PowerPC-based notebook has been removed from the company's online stores in the UK and the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, even as the first Intel-based 15" MacBook Pro machines began to be delivered to buyers.

FOSDEM takes place on the 25th and 26th of February 2006 in Brussels, Belgium. You are all invited to take part in the largest Free Software and Open Source event. The previous edition encountered a huge success with more than 3000 attendees coming from all over the world to attend the talks of famous figures of the Free Software and Open Source community. Read more for more info.