As one can already see by the activity of the mailing lists, Haiku seems to be moving forward in a serious pace. Studio-33 takes a look at the latest build (many screenshots included, boys and girls), and concludes: "I was pretty impressed by this build. Deskbar and espacially Tracker seemed much more stable and Haiku didn't crash every four or five minutes like previous builds I tested. Work on Haiku seems to go pretty fast lately and more and more pieces are getting finished. Offcourse Haiku still needs a lot of work to become somewhat useable, but it is definately going in the right direction."

Apple today announced that it will begin shipping the new 15-inch MacBook Pro this week with faster processors than previously announced. The $2500 model now includes a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo processor, up from the previously announced 1.83GHz, and will begin shipping this week. The $2000 model now includes a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor, up from the previously announced 1.67GHz, and will begin shipping next week. In addition, customers may now upgrade to a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo processor as a build-to-order option on the Apple Online Store. Note: Expect a review of the MacBook Pro on OSNews.com soon.

"Every time I've ever spoken with Mark about DLS to ask him if Ubuntu would come to the show and participate, he says the same thing - Ubuntu is hesitant to come to 'The Linspire show'. Now, Mark has never actually been to the Desktop Linux Summit personally, and try as I have to explain to him the history of the show, I can tell he's just not buying it - it seems that there is nothing I can say to change his view that the Summit is and has always been a 'Linspire show'. If Mark Shuttleworth is misinformed, I'm sure others are misinformed as well. So, rather than dodge the controversy that arose four years ago during the birth of the first DLS, I would like to address it head on."

"In issue 77 of Linux Format we have an interview with Chris DiBona - former Slashdot editor, developer, OSS consultant and now Google's open source program manager. Here are a few of the questions we asked Chris, along with his answers."

"Quartz Composer is a groundbreaking graphics development environment that allows you to explore the incredible power of the graphics stack of Mac OS X Tiger. This article introduces you to Quartz Composer, walks you through a simple sample composition and provides a hands-on exploration to familiarize you with the way you can use it in your own projects. Once you start working with Quartz Composer, you may think of your projects in new ways, and find many more uses for its power and speed."

This Eclipse tutorial gives you a high-level overview of how to use CruiseControl, Luntbuild, and Anthill with Eclipse. Another tutorial shows you how the Eclipse Perl Integration (EPIC) plug-in for Eclipse can help you test Perl applications. One is a traditional Perl debugger, the other tests Perl regular expressions.

"Today, we're making the first source code of our OpenSolaris on Xen project available to the OpenSolaris developer community. There are many bugs still in waiting, many puzzles to be solved, many things left to do. Because we don't believe the developer community only wants finished projects to test. We believe that some developers want to participate during the development process, and now this project can open its doors to that kind of participation. We wanted to start the conversation with working code. So we have a snapshot of our development tree for OpenSolaris on Xen, synced up with Nevada build 31. That code snapshot should be able to boot and run on all the hardware that build 31 can today, plus it can boot as a diskless unprivileged domain on Xen 3.0."

"We set out on investigating this issue immediately after it was discovered, but soon found out that it was a lot more complicated than we thought upon first glance. We've spent almost the past two weeks performing non-stop battery life testing on five notebooks with up to 4 different USB devices, testing theories, trying to pinpoint exactly what causes this problem and testing Microsoft's fix. What follows is the process that we went through in our labs when faced with this strange bug."

"Nearly two years ago Microsoft announced that Windows Vista would sport a so-called 'tiered' graphical experience. The user interface would remain the essentially the same no matter what graphical prowess a machine was blessed with, but the best of the eye-candy and the whiz-bang effects would be reserved for the most modern of computers. While Microsoft has not put the official seal of **CONFIRMED** on any recommended hardware configurations, we have a good idea of what the company will consider as the base for the full-flavored, full-bodied Aero Glass experience."

"The release of Opera 9 Preview 2 marks the start of a new tradition: The Weekly Builds. Every week until the final version of Opera 9 is ready, we intend to ship a weekly updated version of Opera 9 on this blog. The goal is to further open up our development process to our devoted users and allow you to be more involved at an earlier stage than when we ship the next public beta."

"VectorLinux SOHO 5.1.1 Deluxe is a superb Linux distribution in my book. While I don't think it's geared toward the masses in a way that SUSE Linux, Mandriva, or Linspire might be, I do feel it has something to offer Linux users everywhere. It's easy enough to install for someone who at least has a basic understanding of Linux, has a robust compliment of applications, performs very well, and is as stable as it's parent distribution, Slackware, from what I've seen during the review."

"RAVEN ('Rule-based Accessibility Validation Environment') is a suite of Eclipse plug-ins used to inspect and validate the accessibility of Java-based, rich-client GUIs (Swing or SWT) and Eclipse plug-ins. RAVEN can be used to validate pre-existing Java GUI-based applications while the GUI is running."

Just as the bragging rights for dual-core chip supremacy are dying down, Intel gave the first glimpse of a quad-core chip coming next year. Clovertown, a four-core processor, will start shipping to computer manufacturers late this year and hit the market in early 2007. Clovertown will be made for dual-processor servers, which means that these servers will essentially be eight-processor servers. The company will also come out with a previously announced version called Tigerton around the same time for servers with four or more processors.

"Although I hate to do it, it looks like we're going to have to slip Fedora Core 5 test3 by a week. There is an ABI change in the gcc/glibc stack that requires a rebuild of the entire distribution. Given that, there is no way that we'll be able to make a freeze date of Monday. So, test3 will now freeze on Monday, 13 February with a release date of Monday, 20 February."