The second beta of OpenSUSE Linux 10.1 has been released today. Main changes: "Fixes for a number of bugs - but note that most of the bugs reported against beta1 are not fixed yet; further integration and fixing of NetworkManager; SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta1 comes with the Intrusion Prevention framework; AppArmor 2.0 which is started by default in beta2; updated to KDE 3.5.1 release packages." Downloads locations are in the release announcement.

"Shobana Balakrishnan, a program manager on the Windows Longhorn Server team, takes us through the server roadmap and demonstrates Windows Server 2003 R2. Think you know everything about Windows Server? You might be surprised by the innovations this team has shipped and is planning on shipping in Longhorn Server."

"In the 1990s, world chess champion Gary Kasparov played two historic matches against IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer. He won the first match but lost the second by just a single point. As a graduate student at Stanford writing a thesis on artificial intelligence at that time, I was fascinated by the match. I'd been a computer hobbyist since the 1980s as well as a chess buff. Over the years I've tried practically every commercially available chess program on every platform, including Sargon, Socrates, Chessmaster, and others. I used TRS 80 and Apple II computers, and then IBM PCs running DOS, followed by Macintosh and Windows systems. Since that time I've wanted a chess computer as powerful as Deep Blue - my own world-champion-level sparring partner."

"While programs in the Java language are theoretically immune from memory leaks, there are situations in which objects are not garbage collected even though they are no longer part of the program's logical state. This article shows you how Soft references, like weak references, can help applications prevent object loitering by enlisting the aid of the garbage collector in making cache eviction decisions."

Some more news on Apple's Intel Macs. First off, contrary to what OSNews reported on yesterday, a research and investment firm says that sales of the Intel iMac and MacBook Pro are good. Secondly, a contest has been set up to get Windows XP to boot on the Intel Macs.

"This is the first quarterly status report of 2006. However, since there was no status report for the last quarter of 2005, this report summarizes the changes within NetBSD over the last six months, which includes the release of both NetBSD 2.1 and 3.0, a summary of the NetBSD Project's participation in Google's Summer of Code and the release of two stable pkgsrc branches, among many other things."

"I've been gathering information from a variety of knowledgeable sources on the critical issues and milestones affecting the continuing implementation by the Massachusetts IT Division of its OpenDocument Format policy. Here are the issues and milestones that I'll be watching, the state of play of each on as I understand it, and the approximate date to look for an announcement on each."

OS X contains unpatched security flaws of a type that were fixed on alternative operating systems more than a decade ago, according to a security researcher credited with finding numerous bugs in Apple's increasingly popular platform.

Sun Microsystems later this year will introduce virtualization technology to let its newest Sparc-based servers run multiple operating systems simultaneously, catching up to a feature already built into Unix machines from rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Here is a page discussing various myths surrounding Firefox. "We have all seen these banners before or heard people say 'Firefox is faster, Firefox has lower requirements, Firefox is secure, Firefox defends me from all spyware, etc.' How misleading is it? Read on." Flame away. And be gentle. That's an order. And here's a rebuttal.

"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.