In a move that alleviates some privacy concerns, a federal judge granted part of a Justice Department request for Google search data but said users' search queries were off-limits. The 21-page order issued Friday by US District Judge James Ware, represented little change from his stance at a hearing earlier this week.

Apple released another version of the security patch it distributed on March 13 to users of its OS X operating system software, in order to address a problem reported with the update. The company said it distributed the new patch, dubbed Update 2006-002 v1.1, in order to fix an issue with Apple's Safari Web browser that some users observed after installing its 2006-002 security update. According to a post on the company's Web site, the previous update had caused some Safari users to have problems launching the browser.

"The recent emphasis of the Linux community has been on desktop distros that make it easy to install and configure the system without venturing beyond the GUI. Despite the success of these beginner-friendly systems, a significant segment of the Linux population prefers a simpler approach. These back-to-basics users want clarity, stability, and speed, and they do not care about the proliferation of redundant tools and glossy configuration helpers that populate the GUI-based systems. In the past, no-frills Linux users gravitated to systems such as Slackware, Gentoo, or Debian, but another back-to-basics distro is gaining favor among the Linux faithful: Arch Linux."

Chris Muench is a mobile and embedded MVP. Here he shows how to write a managed Direct3D application for Windows Mobile devices.

The inaugural release of Mandriva One, a new live CD that aims to simplify the installation of the Mandriva Linux operating system to a hard disk directly from the live CD, has been released: "An operating system is generally available as a live CD or a set of installation CDs, but not both on the same disc. Mandriva One differs in offering an all-in-one CD based on Mandriva Linux 2006."

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.

"I've been working for the past 15 months on repairing my rusty math skills, ever since I read a biography of Johnny von Neumann. I've read a huge stack of math books, and I have an even bigger stack of unread math books. And it's starting to come together. Let me tell you about it," writes programmer Steve Yegge.

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.

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."

"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."

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.

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.

"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."

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.