Yellow Dog Linux version 4.1, which has been available directly from Terrasoft Solutions since early January, is now available for free download from their various mirrors. This is essentially a recompile of Fedora Core 4 specifically for PowerPC's, with extra polished support for Apple's Macs.

"OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 is available today. This release is recommended for everyone. It contains some new features, fixes many small bugs, and resolves numerous issues. The community have further added import filters for Quattro Pro 6 and Microsoft Word 2. As well, other import filters have been improved and it is now easier to use mail merge. Integration with the KDE address book is now possible. The appearance has also been enhanced, and for Linux users, there are new icon sets for KDE and GNOME."

"Hard disks tend to be one of the weakest points in today's machines. If you can afford it, RAID setups will address the problem. And if you cannot afford it, you probably cannot afford a NAS or a SAN either. The poor man's solution is to regularly back up the information from one disk to another. Of course if your disk dies between two backups, you lose. der Mouse is a Canadian open source developer who produced a bunch of valuable software ranging from anti-spam tools to a PPPoE implementation. At the BSDCan 2005 conference, he presented an innovative solution to hard disk replication. In this interview, der Mouse explains his idea and how he implemented it to us."

"We recently received an email asking for a 'What Is Java' entry on the O'Reilly Network What Is site. Who could possibly not know what Java is in 2006? After ten years of books, websites, and conferences, doesn't everyone know what Java is? Apparently not. After all, things have changed. For every dusty definition that speaks of applets and Just-In-Time compilers, there are new directions and new realities that have settled in, understood by many, yet not always completely documented."

"Technology professionals have loosely used the term 'UNIX' since the first person had to explain the difference between the Berkeley and AT&T flavors, so it's not surprising to find as many UNIX standards as there are versions of the operating system. Peter Seebach wades through the wellspring of UNIX standards and sorts them out for you, concluding that the rumors of the death of UNIX are (as usual) greatly exaggerated."

Even a small operating system can have big disputes within its community. The lead developer of MenuetOS, an OS written in assembly, has decided to drop all support for the 32bit version of Menuet, focusing development on the 64bit version. However, disgruntled users of the open source operating system are trying to keep the 32bit version alive by starting a special forum for it.

It took some time, but someone finally made it happen: Windows XP boots on a Macbook Pro! Screenshot included!

Here are the results of the challenge launched by the Unversity of Wisconsin to test OS X against hacking. "The response has been very strong; traffic to the host spiked at over 30 Mbps. Most of the traffic, aside from casual web visitors, was web exploit scripts, ssh dictionary attacks, and scanning tools such as Nessus. The machine was under intermittent DoS attacks. During the two brief periods of denial of service, the host remained up. The test machine was a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, had two local accounts, and had ssh and http open with their default configurations. There were no successful access attempts during the 38 hour duration of the test period."

"Red Hat is peased to announce the availability of Update 3 for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 family of products. This update includes the following enhancements: hardware support enhancements; technology preview for support of very large system configurations on IA64 (up to 256 logical CPUs) and PPC (up to 128 logical CPUs); security enhancements; and much more."

"Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Inc. believes in offering Linux on the desktop, server, and workstation. What he doesn't believe in, for now, is giving Linux full support on the desktop. In an exclusive interview, Dell explained his company's Linux desktop strategy to DesktopLinux.com's Steven J. Vaughan Nichols."

The ultimate accessory for 8 bit Acorn users, an ARM7 co-processor, is now available to order. Robert Sprowson's ingenious project to produce a second processor sees a 64MHz ARM7TDMI from OKI running alongside a BBC Master's dinosaur 6502 CPU. The box of tricks uses an Altera FPGA as digital glue to bind together the second processor, 16M of RAM, 512K of Flash ROM, and optional serial port and EEPROM chip. The ARM7 chip includes a 8K cache, and the kit took over six months to develop.

David Zeuthen (Red Hat) who wrote and maintains the HAL freedesktop library has announced a new Policy Kit library to manage administrative policies and privileges in a Linux desktop in a desktop neutral, uniform and centralised manner. More about this on his blog.

I recently set up my new Macbook, and I was upset to see that my Windows Media video files no longer worked. The Flip4Mac player that Microsoft endorsed after they officially killed Mac Windows Media Player doesn't install or run on Intel Macs, but it can be easily circumvented with a little tinkering. Read on for details.

In a preview of Tuesday afternoon's demonstration, Intel Marketing Director Brad Graff showed CNET News.com several of the Ultra Mobile PC devices, including an example of the kind of hardware that will ship in the next few weeks as part of the Microsoft effort. As earlier reported, the first devices have a 7-inch touch screen, standard x86 processors, and can run full versions of desktop operating systems including the Windows XP variant being used for Origami.