Serenity Systems has released a German version of their eComStation live-CD. This is the third language supported; a Dutch and English version already were released. In addition, an update to their beta program for eCs 2.0 has also been released, just a day after they announced the opening of the beta program.

Leading Linux developers are divided on whether the open source operating system should use the next version of the GNU General Public License. The first public discussion draft of GPL 3 was released last week. Over the weekend the Linux kernel mailing list started discussing whether this version could be used, as this may require a consensus among kernel developers.

"Within the next few weeks, Microsoft will be releasing beta 2 of Windows Vista. The actual ship date of Vista hasn't been announced, but Microsoft's new OS is likely to ship sometime this Fall. Since Windows Vista was announced, some of the bleeding-edge features have been scaled back. For example, WinFS, a file system built using relational database concepts, won't be included in the final release. But it's likely that the Windows Vista's feature list is now stable enough that we can predict what kind of system you'll need to build today to accommodate the new OS."

"Here's a question for you: what have the Nazi wartime test facility at Peenemunde and the Australian city of Perth got in common? Well, the first thing (and just about the only thing, truth be told) which springs to mind is that they are both next to large bodies of water. This is useful if you're going to test things which might go bang. Like V-2 rockets and - wait for it - flying cars."

"To the outside observer, improvements in PC architecture are evolutionary but logical. Processors advance inevitably in speed and performance, in happy accordance with Moore's Law. For Nebojsa Novakovic, a consultant in high-end computing systems, that's hardly the case. The demise of the DEC Alpha processor is a case in point. A performance leader was killed off by corporate whim."

While the most high-profile security vulnerability of late was almost certainly the WMF hole recently patched by Microsoft, in terms of actual numbers of infections it was barely a blip on the radar. According to the anti-virus company F-Secure, one of the most populous and dangerous infections today is not some sophisticated bit of code exploiting a new and exotic security hole, but an old-school e-mail worm written in Visual Basic that spreads by tempting users with free pornography.

"What is it with old languages? I only have to mention REXX while talking about Mumps and someone (the sort of person who remembers that the original, circa 1970-80, MUMPS was actually an O/S, language and integrated DBMS all in one - I can relate to that, perhaps why I like iSeries too) jumps up to say how much they liked it. I liked REXX partly because (like many other much-loved languages), it actually had a personality attached to it - Mike Cowlishaw."

"I decided to do some simple tests to see how important RAM is when running applications under Rosetta. If you rely heavily on applications that are not yet universal make sure you load that new Intel Mac up with 1.5 - 3.77 times the RAM in your current PowerPC machine."

"FreeNAS is a free NAS server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS protocols, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 16MB once installed on Ccompact flash, hard drive or USB key. The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall."

Geeks.com sent us a special edition of the Toshiba e800 Pocket PC PDA. What's special about this new revision we review today is that it comes by default with a very high capacity battery and the ability to use USB devices through its "presentation pack" accessory, making it a product best suited for professionals, but also for geeks.

There are a lot of options in the Free UNIX market at the moment. Everyone's favorite buzzword is Linux, and Sun is in the process of releasing Solaris under a Free Software license. One family, however, receives less attention than it is due. Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) has grown into almost a complete replacement for UNIX, with numerous enhancements. David Chisnall explains why the BSD family has found its way into a large number of systems and what these systems can do for you.

Want to share your stuff with Mac OS X Server? If you need to understand the basics of file sharing using Mac OS X Server, Ryan Faas walks you through both the underlying concepts and the actual steps involved in setting up file sharing and share points. This article is everything you need to know about creating a file server using Mac OS X Server: from the basics of share points to customizing user home directories and everything in-between.

"It was during the opening weeks of 1986 that the first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild. Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users. Now 20 years after they first appeared there are more than 150000 malicious programs in existence."

"In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure MyDNS, a DNS server that uses a MySQL database as backend instead of configuration files like, for example, Bind or djbdns. This has the advantage that you can easily use web-based frontends to administrate your DNS records. MyDNS simply reads the records from the database, and it does not have to be restarted/reloaded when DNS records change or zones are created/edited/deleted! I will also show how to set up a secondary DNS server, but I will not use normal zone transfers to get the records from the primary to the secondary DNS server; instead, I will use MySQL database replication. I will simply replicate the data from the primary to the secondary server."