"OpenGrok in that sense is a true enabler for source code that is open source. It lets people easily and quickly find the source code, look at it, understand the history and changes made to the source. It certainly has made my life easy when I am looking for security holes in software."

A developer meeting strengthens a Linux desktop alliance that could lead to better leverage with hardware vendors and more cross-distribution efforts such as the newly created Portland Project.

"Of all the myths that have grown up around open source software, perhaps the most pervasive is Eric Raymond's aphorism that 'Many eyes make bugs shallow', suggesting that if lots of people can view a program's source code, they will find and fix its errors more quickly than commercial products whose code is jealously guarded. The only problem with this is that it's not true - certainly not in one of the flagship projects of open source, OpenOffice."

Microsoft postponed the introduction of the next test release of its Internet Explorer 7 Web browser until sometime in 2006, according to comments posted to the company's site for software developers. In a blog posting on the software giant's MSDN developer site, Dean Hachamovitch, product line manager for IE at Microsoft, said that the company will post an "updated pre-release build of IE 7 for Windows XP publicly" during the first calendar quarter of 2006. The IE team leader indicated that people interested in gaining access to the browser preview would not need to be members of the MSDN community. In related news, there's an exploit in Firefox 1.5 on Windows SP2.

Parallels Workstation 2.0 has been released. From the press release: "After months of focused research, development and testing, Parallels today announced the immediate general availability of Parallels Workstation 2.0, the world’s first hypervisor-powered desktop virtualization solution."

"The FreeBSD project has hundreds of active developers spread all over the world, and many of them have their own parts of the source-tree that they work on. However, there are always a lot of new interesting projects and ideas that needs to be investigated and evaluated, and this is where the FreeBSD project relies on heroic efforts from volunteers. The following list of possible projects is in no way complete, but it should serve as a nice starting point for volunteers who would like to become committers in the future."

Read about the design, verification, and making of the 165-million-transistor Xbox 360: a first-pass-good processor with advanced debug and test features, designed to the exacting standards of a gaming platform, with high throughput, low latency, low cost and low power - and very tight deadlines.

What's the next step in creating an easy-to-use Linux-based product for consumers? A touchscreen facade can make back-end Linux applications very usable in such devices as custom digital media centers, DVRs and PVRs, and even control interfaces for household robots. The potential uses are limited only by the imagination. In this article, get an overview for installing an LCD taken from a Sony PSOne, creating a modeline, and installing a touchscreen -- all for Linux.

Every security savvy professional lives with the daily fear of the "never expiring password" being exposed. It's the unspoken taboo, the wide open back door in every corporate network. But no-one ever acknowledges it or discusses it. All applications have got pre-defined passwords that never change. Which means developers, privileged users and hosting third party service providers will all have access to these passwords.

"When looking at desktop Linux by itself, any analysis of the subject quickly leads to this question: why do users choose one version over another? There are as many answers for this question as there are users to give them, but ultimately it should boil down to just a few key decisions which must be made. Considering this, it may be surprising to some people to find out how successful Ubuntu Linux has been relative to other distributions."

How can a company be just about everywhere, and yet nobody knows its name? Just ask Michel Mayer, chief executive of Freescale Semiconductor.

Here is an interview with Ubuntu's Fabio Morzacca, "Ubuntu developer, but also member of the Italian Ubuntu LoCoTeam, father of two children, and for his employment, dealing with company management and reorganizations. We asked him questions about his personal life, his view on Linux and Ubuntu in particular, and about two applications of which he is the developer and maintainer: the BUM graphical Boot-Up Manager, and the Baobab graphical disk-space viewer."

Here is a test concerning NVIDIA SLI on Linux (in this case, OpenSUSE 10.0 OSS). "With our previous article that we published moments ago, demonstrating the performance of the GeForce 7800GTX 256MB under Linux with the 1.0-8174 Rel80 drivers that were finally released today, there's no disputing that the Windows XP NVIDIA ForceWare users can generally see a significantly higher frame-rate with the same hardware components, in addition to other features that aren't yet supported by the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers. However, how do NVIDIA's initial Rel80 Linux drivers (1.0-8174) fair in the world of Scalable Link Interface?"

"Although having this reputation, my question was: was a RAID 1 system too slow? Was it slower than not having any RAID? In fact, there are people that say that it is the other way round - these people say that having software RAID 1 is faster than having just one hard disk drive. In any case, who is right?"