Red Hat is letting Novell's Mono software only into its noncommercial Fedora product line, the Linux seller said Tuesday. Red Hat has no plans at this time to include the Novell software in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, company spokeswoman Gillian Farquhar said, meaning that there are no plans right now to make it a standard part of the commercially supported product from the Linux leader.

Christian Neumair a core contributor to the Nautilus and gnome-vfs project for GNOME detected some critical design flaws inside gnome-vfs and brought up some concerns wether these problems can be fixed at all. He also mentioned that these critical design issues might lead into loss of important data and other nasty things.

Tests at Microsoft's Linux lab show that counting the raw number of security updates required by the various operating system flavors is not as meaningful as examining the efficiency of the update process.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab is using Linux extensively... on the desktop! "At the JPL, it is common to see Red Hat Inc., SuSE or Mandriva Linux running on users' desktops alongside Windows.". On a side note, they don't trust Linux on the server: "Our personal view is that Linux, period, is only for the desktop. We don't run our main servers on Linux, because there are too many flaws in main Linux kernel," he said.

Oracle and Sun yesterday renewed their vows of collaboration and detailed their plans to give Microsoft .NET a Java-based run for its money.

Today virtualization is expensive for licensing. Microsoft asks people to license every OS installed on virtual machines, even if powered off. But something is changing. Since the release of Windows Server 2003 R2 Microsoft started approaching a per-use licensing model instead of a per-installation model. So that now Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition owners can run up to 4 virtual machines with same OS at no additional costs.

"This article fairly eloquently expounds some of the reasons why Linux's job is not to become increasingly Windows-like, nor is it Open Source's duty to merely provide free duplicates of every Windows-user's favorite program. The issue has never been anything about Elite Snob vs. Concerned Newbie. It is simply a misunderstanding of what the Linux and the Open Source world is all about. Linux is not about repeating Windows with its features and flaws. It is an opportunity to experiment with new and wonderful alternatives", says OSNews reader Bob Jamison.

BentUser takes a look at the differrences between Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista b5270. The differrences are interesting and help to show what improvements, if any, have been made in the oft-delayed operating system.

IP attorney Thomas Carey shoots down SCO's cases against Linux, Linux users, IBM and Novell, but predicts that "SCO will follow Hitler's example and go on fighting a losing battle".

Apple's Steve Jobs has announced several new products today during his keynote at MacWorld (photos). After the usual chit-chat about the success of the retail stores and iTunes, Jobs got to the meat of the matter. He announced an FM-tuner with remote-control for the Nano/Video iPod. Read more for the really interesting stuff!

"On Tuesday, Novell announced the creation of the AppArmor project, a new GPL open-source project dedicated to advancing Linux application security. Novell's AppArmor is an intrusion-prevention system that protects Linux and its applications from the effects of attacks, viruses and malicious applications. AppArmor is based on technology that Novell acquired from Immunix, a leading provider of Linux host-based application security solutions, when it purchased the company in May 2005."

"LIRC is basically a small server which can decode or transmit infra-red signals. This is a tutorial about how to set up the LIRC server and how to use it in order to control your system or specific LIRC-enabled applications with a remote control. Examples of simple or more complicated setups are also provided."

"The new version 5 of WindowBlinds adds features like per-pixel alpha blending, as well as the ability to change toolbar icons, progress animations, and the hue and saturation of the Windows interface. WindowBlinds runs as a Windows XP extension to the Themes feature, so it doesn't require any additional program to run on your PC to work. It also takes advantage of your graphics processor to display its interface eye candy, so that your CPU won't slow down. In fact, the company claims that repainting, resizing, and moving windows will be noticeably quicker as a result of this use of video acceleration for the UI. The Hyperpaint feature even lets you adjust the degree of hardware acceleration. Hyperpaint uses the extra video RAM on your video card to buffer windows, which makes moving them faster."

"According to George Cook of WVNET this cluster has been up for over 10 years. WVNET is the West Virginia Network, a dynamic service organization providing telecommunications and computing services within West Virginia. WVNET was created in 1975 to provide central computing facilities and wide-area network communications linking its 'central site' computing resources in Morgantown with the campus computing systems at most of the colleges and universities throughout the state. The cluster consists of an Alpha 4100 (with four 533Mhz CPUs) running VMS 7.3-2; a VAX 6000-630 running VMS 7.3; and four DEC 3000 workstations running VMS 7.3-2."