The first preview release of (K)Ubuntu 6.04 Dapper Drake has been released. You can download Ubuntu here, and Kubuntu here. Screenshots can be found here and here.

"Well, it is that time of the year again. With Halloween done and over with its time for Thanksgiving and, before you know it, the holiday season. Every company realizes this and has made sure the stores are packed with cool new gadgets, gifts, and gizmos. This guide is going to go over a few of the items which appear of the wishlists of a few of the staff members. Nothing too formal, but you can get an idea of some of the cool products to keep an eye out for this season."

Matthias Scheler, on behalf of the NetBSD Release engineering team, announced that the release process for NetBSD 3.0 has officially begun. The first release candidate is available for download here.It is expected to have RC2 available on the FTP server in about a week, which hopefully will be the final release candidate. So if all goes well the release of 3.0 is approximately three weeks away.

The Eclipse platform allows pluggable components -- plug-ins -- to help create a rich graphical user interface (GUI) application. With Eclipse you can enhance a user's app experience by adding views to the GUI. This article will teach you how Eclipse makes it easy to link views and provides ways to adapt view linking to non-UI scenarios.

In an email to the GCC development mailing list, one of the main developers of LLVM revealed that his recent employment at Apple has been focused on integrating LLVM with GCC, and is now proposing a long-term merge of the two projects.

Channel9 recently visited the Vista Print team and learned about the new Print stack in Vista and took a tour of the team and the lab where print testing happens. The 1-hour WMV video is 228 MB.

Intel's Hyperthreading Technology is being blamed for server performance problems. With both SQL Server and Citrix Terminal Server installations, HT-enabled motherboards show markedly degraded performance under heavy load. Disabling HT restores expected levels, according to reports from within the IT industry.

LinuxDevices has once again published the proceedings of the annual Real-Time Linux Workshop. This one, the seventh, was held in France earlier this month, at the University for Science and Technology of Lille (USTL). The papers span a range of topics, from fundamental real-time technologies to applications, hardware, and tools.

The Firebird Project is pleased to announce the release of Firebird 2.0 Beta 1 kits for immediate download and testing. This version of Firebird 2 is an beta version, meant for field testing only and not for use in production. Please read the Release Notes for more details.

"Red Hat Desktop is sensible to the point of austerity, but practical in the way it supports updates and other features. It's not for individuals or very small businesses, but larger companies who calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) may well find it worth considering." More here.

"In such a scenario, Microsoft is investing money in software development, and even though the final product is great (and I use that term loosely) by itself, it is not so significant a change that people will upgrade immediately. I expect a lot of people to stick with their current office suite even when Office 12 becomes a retail reality; same could be the case with Windows Vista. Having said that, it's also a given that there is no way software development can come to a halt. What option does that leave the software industry with?"

SUSE Linux 10.1 alpha 3 has been released. Changes include: "Update to KDE 3.5 RC1; update of GCC to the current 4.1 development version; removal of linuxthreads support; NetworkManager will be the new way of managing changing network interfaces, Kinternet is now in maintenance mode; update to Linux kernel 2.6.14.2; /dev on tmpfs is mandatory, a static device directory is not supported any more; udev is now the sole program for handling hotplug events, superseding the old hotplug package."

"So who blinked in Tunis - the US or everybody else? After two years of bickering, it looks like it was everybody else, and that the US will still control the root directory of the Internet. Of course, that depends on who's doing the spinning."

"If you shop around, you can actually get a functional computer for $500 (EUR 425,-). But as we become more budget conscious, $500 seems to be a bit much for a standard machine, so what's our next target? Why, it's an over ambitious $100 (EUR 85,-) notebook. How companies accomplish this is their business; what we are interested in is what they ship out for a product when all is said and done. As of now, however, there is one thing that interests me even more, and that is, why would they want to sell me a $100 notebook in the first place?"