Without getting into specific dates at this time, sources familiar with Apple's Macintosh hardware roadmap say the company is striving to unveil a completely redesigned set of Intel iBook laptops just in time for next year's K-12 educational buying season, which takes place around April or May. Expected to make its debut even earlier than the new iBooks will be Apple's first Intel-based PowerBook, sources added.

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."

The T2 Project released the final release for the 2.1 series. T2 is a system development environment that allows the automated build for all sorts of architectures including utilization of alternative C libraries such as DietlibC or uClibC for really tiny embedded systems - including support for cross compiling, ccache and distcc. Normal deskop and servers builds are supported as well. The future aganda includes expanding to allow builds for non-Linux kernels such as BSD, Darwin and Solaris.

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.

The clocks have fallen back, the leaves are hitting the ground and new BSD releases are on the Net. Among all the noise and buzz created by Linux, it's important to remember that it's not the only open source variant of Unix. OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD are all still very much alive and kicking and have recently been released from their respective projects.

"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."

OneStat reported that Mozilla's browsers have a total global usage share of 11.51 percent. The total usage share of Mozilla increased 2.82 percent since April 2005. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 85.45 percent which is 1.18 percent less as at the end of April.

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.

"This is the second of a two-part e-mail client comparison. In Part 1 our comparison included Outlook Express 6.0 and Thunderbird 1.0. In Part 2 we are comparing the groupware suites Outlook 2003, Evolution 2.2.1.1 and Kontact 1.1."

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.

If Microsoft makes good on its self-destructive threat to pull Windows from the South Korean market rather than accede to local damands to un-bundle its proprietary media and IM apps, there's a safe harbour waiting in the form of blanket, country-wide licenses for the OS formerly known as Lindows. Linspire honcho Kevin Carmony has made a formal offer to South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to license every computer in the realm for the bargain price of $5 million (E4.2 million).

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.

A month behind schedule, Nokia starts shipping its Linux-powered 770 Internet Tablet in Europe, sporting a 4-inch 800x480 display, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 1.2, Opera 8.02 browser and more. UPDATE: Many thanks to Toni Leppänen for sending us a screenshot of Opera rendering OSNews.

FreeBSD 6.0 has been released, but an official announcement is not yet available. You can download the .iso images here (mirror list). More information, documentation and release notes for the various architectures can be found here. Note: read this. Update: It's official.