The german site dedicated to Linux on PPC systems PPCNUX has benchmarked the 3D drivers available for MorphOS using the three generations of the famous FPS Quake, in order to test the quality of indipendently developed drivers on a non-mainstream OS running on non-mainstream PPC hardware. You can find the english version of the article here.

Have you ever needed a software RAID solution for a low-end server install? Perhaps you've wanted your workstation to take advantage of the redundancy provided by a disk mirror without investing in a hardware RAID controller. Has a prior painful configuration experience turned you off software RAID altogether on Unix systems? Read more at OnLamp.

The X.org foundation has released the 2nd release candidate of X11R6.9/X11R7; X11R6.9-RC2 is built in the traditional Monolithic style, where as X11R7 is based on the new Modular system. Testing is going to commence on both Monolithic and Modular source trees, here you can see what needs to be tested in this release.

The AROS Show has done an interview with Michal Schulz who is a longtime member of the AROS Team, in the interview he talks about how he got interested in Amiga's and how he came to be on the team, and where he see's AROS going in the next couple years.

The KDE community is happy to announce KDE 3.5 release candidate 1. More info here.

Alan Ritter, Western Washington Univ. senior and computer science major, received recognition on Oct. 16 for his successful participation in Google's Summer of Code. He spent the summer working on a code which makes Windows network drivers adaptable to the NetBSD operating system.

"Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than people talking about you is people NOT talking about you, and it must have been with this in mind that Microsoft recently "leaked" two company-wide memos concerning the Redmond's new strategic direction -- its so-called Live strategy that I wrote about last week" says Cringely.

Silicon Graphics will start showing off the Altix 4000 Monday, the second generation of the company's technical computing machines based on the Linux operating system and Itanium processors.

On their blogspot site, Bill Buck and Raquel Velasco, owners of Genesi (which manufactures Pegasos PowerPC-CPU based motherboards) revealed that they could soon release all designs, layouts, HAL and Open Firmware of their platforms under GPL licence.

"As you already know, if I have to sit down in front of a computer, I want it to be running the Gnome desktop on Linux. I've watched it mature from a downright ugly, needlessly complex playground for geeks, to an attractive, simple interface that holds its own against commercial alternatives. And yet, every day I still encounter rough edges that make me think there aren't nearly enough folks out there hacking away at this stuff. I'd like to watch." Read more at PCWorld. Warning: While some of the author's gripes can be fixed by installing third party applications or plugins, or by tweaking Alsa etc, the point remains that his default distribution and/or Gnome did not come with these conveniences by default. Most people don't like tweaking stuff, they want things that "just work".

Linus Torvalds has threatened that if developers add 'last-minute things' to the next version of the Linux kernel he will 'refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively'.

The number of useful desktop applications for Linux is growing every day, but there are many would-be users who still have one or more "must have" Windows applications. For those users, running Windows under Linux is a suitable alternative to having to maintain two systems, or a dual-boot system with Linux and Windows. One of the options for running Windows under Linux is Win4Lin, Inc.'s Win4Lin Pro, which was released earlier this year.

In the simplest terms, DWR is an engine that exposes methods of server-side Java objects to JavaScript code. Effectively, with DWR, you can eliminate all of the machinery of the Ajax request-response cycle from your application code. This article shows you how to use Direct Web Remoting (DWR) to expose JavaBeans methods directly to your JavaScript code and automate the heavy-lifting of Ajax.

Virus writers are exploiting Sony's controversial anti-piracy software to hide their malicious creations. In late October Sony was found to be using stealth techniques to hide software that stopped some of its CDs being illegally copied. Now three virus variants have been found that use the Sony software to evade detection by anti-virus programs. The rootkit is also installed on Mac OS X systems.