"Rex Dieter has been making the unofficial KDE Red Hat packages for some years now. Since this is a service depended upon by thousands of Red Hat users to get their required latest build of KDE, KDE Dot News interviewed Rex to find out how he got started, why the need for the project exists and how he makes the packages. Read on for the interview.

"2005 will be remembered for the emergence of multicore CPUs, the rise of enterprise x86, and even the quiet realization in datacenters throughout the land that CPU virtualization works wonders. But these weren’t the only technologies making waves. The year also brought important - if perhaps more subtle - progress to nearly the entire IT landscape. InfoWorld followed the action, analyzing the advances and lifting the hood on the latest innovations. What will be the most meaningful developments in 2006? What were the best products of 2005?"

In this article, Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++) talks about the next version of the widely used general-purpose programming language. This next version, called C++0x for now, will most likely be finished by 2009. The article discusses new language features, for example concepts - which specify the properties required of a type and can be used with templates. Stroupstrup also talks about new standard C++ libraries.

"In this tutorial (free reg. req.) Ian Shields introduces you to Linux devices, filesystems, and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Learn in depth how to create partitions and filesystems, maintain the integrity of filesystems, mount and unmount filesystems, manage disk quota, use file permissions to control access to files, manage file ownership, create and change hard and symbolic links, find system files and place files in the correct location."

David Reveman has made the latest XGL source code available to download. This comes a few weeks after development of the project was criticised for being done 'behind closed doors'. There have been huge changes to XGL, the most significant being restructuring of the code, allowing XGL's GLX support to function on other drivers than the proprietary Nvidia one. Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used. An OpenGL based compositing manager, 'Compiz' is currently in the works and a release is expected in February. David intends to get the code into freedesktop CVS as soon as possible, after which the code should eventually merge with Xorg.

Despite some challenges in 2005, Kevin Rollins, president and CEO of Dell, insists the company's business model is a strong one, and that he sees no significant changes to it in the year ahead. Rollins recently spoke with eWeek news editor Dennis Fisher and senior editors Jeffrey Burt and Brian Fonseca about such issues as customer server, channel strategies and AMD.

Microsoft is working hard to make sure the latest version of its e-mail, calendaring and messaging server, Exchange 12, appeals to both enterprise IT administrators and end users. The first beta of the product, released earlier this month, offers enhanced administrative controls as well as a unified messaging feature that will deliver fax, voice mail, e-mail and speech recognition.

The VOICE newsletter for OS/2 and eComStation has returned. The January issue can be found here, and it contains articles on NVU, DFSee, a report on WarpStock Europe 2005, and much more. "Finally! Some may have thought that the newsletter had gone the way of all flesh. Indeed, the revision has taken a while and we skipped some issues. This step was neccessary to be able to focus on our work, or it would have taken even longer. At this point, I would like to thank all the persons involved, especially Holger Manthey for many ideas, creating images, and his patience."

"There is a curious lack in the Linux community - the number of community-led Linux distributions for commodity mobile phone hardware is zero. As reported two years ago by LinuxDevices, the aim of the Xanadux project is to change that, and this article describes how it's getting on."

The stock shot up like a weed on a sunny spring day. Red Hat shares rose 104 percent, making it the top gainer among 28 public companies based in the region. It highlights an adage of business: performance pays. Red Hat, after bolstering its executive ranks and making other tweaks, has reported solid sales and profit growth. In the most recent quarter, which ended Nov. 30, it beat analysts' expectations for both.

I recently saw a post on Neowin which said that Vista will no longer allow the use of region-free DVD drives for movie playback; I found this strange considering in some nations region-coding DVDs is illegal as it goes against consumer rights. Neowin also links against an MS developers blog, where he talks about MS lacking any region-free drives to test legacy code on, and this may lead to lack of support for those drives. So where does this leave consumers who have region-free drives? Well you'll be able to still use DVD-data discs you just wont be able to play encrypted/region-coded DVDs anymore.

The JNode Project has released version 0.2.2 of their OS. This release offers improvements in the classpath runtime library and numberous GUI improvements; the changelog details the rest of the improvements in this release of JNode.