Currently in beta-testing, Parallels Workstation is a new virtual machine system for Windows and Linux. The main program is wizard driven and it takes around 30 seconds to set up a virtual machine profile.

Rumors circulating that Novell is going to kill off its popular Linux desktop lines are completely false. Novell is making one large strategic change. The GNOME interface is going to become the default interface on both the SLES and Novell Linux Desktop line. KDE libraries will be supplied on both, but the bulk of Novell's interface moving forward will be on GNOME. "The entire KDE graphical interface and product family will continue to be supported and delivered on OpenSuSE."

The Lycoris source-code saga doesn't seem to want to die, but hopefully the following article will kill this already dead horse. "Parties on both sides of the Lycoris source code controversy stepped up to clarify the issues raised in a LXer article published on Wednesday. Both sides took issue with some of the statements in the article. The controversy came to light as a report on OSNews.com, and the ensuing discussion left questions in many users' minds as to whether the code in question would, in fact, be released."

ArsTechnica looks back: "In November of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at Europe's CERN Particle Physics Laboratory, invented the very first web server and web browser. The server, entitled simply httpd, and the browser, called WorldWideWeb, ran on Tim's NeXT cube and worked exclusively on the NeXTstep operating system. Archive copies of Tim's first web page and some early web sites show a web that is simultaneously very different from the modern one and yet still very familiar."

E4X is an extension of JavaScript that adds direct support for XML to the language. So what is direct support and why is it valuable? Get an introduction to ECMAScript for XML (E4X), a simple extension to JavaScript that makes XML scripting very simple.

In this article .NET 2.0 won 2 out of the 3 major tests – clearly besting Java 1.5 in both execution speed and real-world memory efficiency. Java did, however, manage to hold its own in the native types memory comparison by a pretty wide margin. This indicates that on the whole .NET is a more efficient platform, with perhaps at least one area for improvement – native type memory efficiency.

"Contrary to what was expected from recent Novell announcements, Novell executives are apparently slicing deeply into the Linux heart of the company. Jobs and resources are actually being slashed in several areas previously dubbed by Novell management as "key component parts of Novell's Linux developments": staffers working on Mono, Hula, Evolution and Desktop Strategy are getting the sack. SUSE customers around the world will be shocked and puzzled by this management decision."

Were Apple to once again start licensing its operating system to third-party 'Mac clone' hardware makers, it could reignite the OS wars. Yet whether Apple will go this route - and whether doing so would be smart - remains to be seen.

As part of a painfully slow and vague striptease, Sun has started to describe a couple of techniques it will use to improve processor performance in its soon to be released Niagara chip and future Rock processor line. Despite hinting a couple of years back that Niagara would have special technology for handling TCP/IP and SSL loads, Sun has stayed largely quiet on the subject. Recently, however, Sun confirmed that its Niagara processors and Solaris 10 operating system have been tweaked to handle these specialized tasks.

"Java 5.0 offers developers some powerful new choices for developing high-performance concurrent applications. Download the IBM Java 5 Standard Edition and start your Java 5.0 coding today."

LXer received a document from an anonymous source with the message "I read your article on linuxJournel about countries growing use of Linux. The attached article was posted in Intel's intranet site." It reveals that Intel expects to sell hundreds of millions of Linux-based computers in rural China. If Intel can sell a Linux computer in rural China.

Ging, the only live distribution based on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, has made its way to the 0.1.0 release. Ging is now using KDE 3.4 as its desktop, and includes a mixture of KDE and GNOME applications: Konqueror, Gimp, Koffice, Gaim, and more. And for those who have tried previous versions of Ging, you'll be greatly pleased to see the boot time has decreased by a factor of ~15 times.

Two recent articles cover the success of Trolltech and their product Qt 4, on which KDE 4 will be based. 'Trolltech: A case study in open source business' looks at the continued growth of the company based on dual licenced Free Software. The article describes what KDE and Trolltech gain from each other, including user feedback to Trolltech and sponsored developers for KDE. The Australian Computerworld declares that Qt 4 raises the bar for cross-platform app dev tools. They cover the separate modules of Qt 4 and the cross-platform quality, giving it a 9.2 out of 10 approval rating.

Imendio improves Nautilus on the Novell desktop by providing support for integrated Beagle search functionality. Imendio developed the low level integration and implemented the user interface design from the specifications supplied by Novell. This has resulted in the ability for GNOME users to search for files and folders using their standard file management tool. The results are available in the Nautilus branch called nautilus-search.