"Customers demanded it and now it's here. Sun is challenging Dell to a Benchmark Brawl. Up for contention are the titles for the server side Java benchmark. Floating point intensive calculation. Power consumption. And the jewel in the crown, price-performance. If Dell accepts, benchmarks will be conducted by a neutral, third-party lab running agreed upon industry-standard benchmarks. Dell has until January 31, 2006 to accept the challenge. Testing to be done using Sun Fire x4100 and X4200 servers and the corresponding Dell Xeon servers that are commercially shipping in volume."

Novell is running a survey on which applications people are most interested in getting ported to Linux. With enough votes, they'll take the highest ranked ones and present the results to the companies, hopefully in persuading them to consider that there is a market. You can read a preliminary report, or take the survey yourself.

At last week's launch of the first draft for the revised GNU General Public Licence, the Debian project was out in force. Besides Branden Robinson, the Debian Project Leader, Debian members at the meeting included Don Armstrong, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bruce Perens, and several Debian members from the Boston area. In the aftermath of the meeting, a consensus is still emerging, but Debian members seem to regard GPL3 generally favorably, although some have concerns about exact wording and the implications of some parts of the draft.

GNU is actively developing Gnash, an open source Flash movie player distributed under the GPL license. Based on GameSWF, Gnash will eventually provide complete support for SWF version 7 compliant Flash movies. Implemented with OpenGL and libxml2, Gnash will be avilable as a standalone Flash player, and as a Firefox plug-in. In order to avoid any potential intellectual property conflicts, the Gnash developers are not using any Macromedia tools to facilitate faster development. Instead of reverse engineering Macromedia technologies, the Gnash developers are basing their implementation on the SWF specification.

Genesi is pleased to announce the order period for evaluation systems for the High Density Blade and HDB Chassis is now open. The HDB can be deployed in a variety of configurations. The HDB features one or paired Freescale MPC7447, MPC7447A or MPC7448 PowerPC processor(s) and the Tundra Tsi109 host bridge.

"A while back, when Microsoft announced its decision to no longer release a monthly CTP for Vista, we were a bit worried, since we wanted to follow-up on the latest developments of Microsoft's next-generation operating system (though Microsoft promised to update current versions via critical updates). To Microsoft's credit, it has kept its word and has released an update sooner than we had anticipated, and needless to say, the changes in this release are substantial."

Microsoft is to open up the source code behind its server communication protocols, in an attempt to get the European Commission off its back. The announcement covers the source code behind the communication protocols for Windows Workgroup Server and Windows Desktop. Microsoft already offers 12000 pages of technical documents and 500 hours of free technical support to anyone applying for a license. Companies making software which interacts with Microsoft servers use those licences to make their products work properly with Microsoft ones. Such license-holders will now also get to look at the source code, but will not have the right to publish the code or include it in their own products.

"Probably everyone who reads DesktopLinux.com encounters the same question over and over again: "What's the best Linux desktop distribution?" Now, while some people will swear up and down that Slackware or Fedora or even Puppy, for that matter, is the best Linux desktop, I think the answer is more complicated. In fact, I don't think there is a single answer."

"Generally, file systems are not considered 'sexy'. When a young programmer wants to do something really cool, his or her first thought is generally not 'dude, two words... File system'. However, I am what is politely termed 'different'. I find file systems very interesting and they have seldom been more so than they are right now. Hans Reiser is working on getting Reiser4 integrated into the Linux kernel, the BSDs are working on getting a journaled file system together, and Sun Microsystems just recently released a beta of ZFS into OpenSolaris. This is an excellent time to be me. This article will be on file system design and specifically the new file systems that are just appearing. We will start with the basics, UFS/FFS, and then proceed to our first modern file system, XFS.

Today the eyeOS Project Team has officially released the first version of a MiniServer application that allows the eyeOS Web Desktop Environment 0.8.8 to be installed locally on an MS Windows machine with a very simple installation process. This will later help to expand the efforts in making eyeOS a complete intranet solution.

"I first demoed Versora Progression Desktop at LinuxWorld Boston in February of 2005, and was impressed by what it could do. Basically it takes all of your essential data and program settings (and even some decidedly nonessential settings) and transfers them to GNU/Linux. I hadn't heard much from the company since then - until Linspire announced a partnership with them recently. The deal is, Progression Desktop will move you from Windows to Linspire without any hassle."

"Selling RISC OS to the general public is always going to be difficult; despite some software developements in the last few years, it still lacks features which have long since been ubiquitous on other platforms - especially what might be termed the big three - Windows (more relevantly, WinXP), Mac OS X and Linux. clearly has many problems to overcome before it can really gain any wider appeal. But instead of mentioning those in further detail once again, I'd like to cover a topic I hinted at in a earlier article - a ready to go RISC OS demo."

A Dutch company has released an Alpha emulator for Windows XP (what's with the buzz around Alpha lately, people?). From their website: "The PersonalAlpha software lets you run your Alpha/OpenVMS software on a standard Personal Computer. Imagine running your VMS- programs on your office PC, notebook or computer at home. Develop, test and run Alpha/OpenVMS applications wherever you are. This product proves that Alpha-virtualization in software is possible and commercially available. PersonalAlpha is the 32-bit prelude to a suite of 64-bit VirtualAlpha software products that Emulators International soon will release. These solutions allow you to replace your Alpha computers without changing the applications."

"Elements of Microsoft's next-generation Web browsing software have been posted on a Windows-related blog site, including screen shots of what the application may look like and a link to some of its code. While the links to the build code for what appears to be a beta version of Internet Explorer 7 have since been yanked off the JCXP.net Windows forum, the site is still showing off roughly 14 screen shots of the browser. The person who originally posted the links and photos to the site has since removed the ability for users to click through to the code sample, reportedly at Microsoft's request. However, JCXP.net indicated that before removing the code it was downloaded as many as 12000 times."