According to Andy Updegrove, Microsoft seems to be reconsidering support for OpenDocument. A quote from the blog: "So there is no line drawn in the sand, nor (to put it another way) has Microsoft painted itself into a corner. If OpenDocument picks up steam, a back door for support is ajar."

"Various reviews I've seen about Ubuntu have attacked the release names (Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger and upcoming Dapper Drake), or the 'ugly' brown GNOME screen background (which is easily changed). I consider such "flaws" to be trivial. When push comes to shove, I want my operating system to 'just work', and in this department Ubuntu delivers."

Mockup 0.2.0 alpha1 has been released. Just like v0.1.0, this release is focused on the underlying foundation, "this means that it's useful only for developers and it's not easy to install."

OpenOffice.org made available for free download a third release candidate of Version 2.0 of its popular open-source office suite Friday. The release includes bug fixes only and no new features.

Max Brunning has posted a brief comparison of how these three Operating Systems approach a number of basic kernel tasks. He has a brief look at: Scheduling and Schedulers, Memory Management and Paging, and File Systems. Max is an Instructor who spends his time teaching Solaris internals, device drivers, and kernel crash dump analysis and debugging.

This blog-entry is a short tutorial how to set up Fedora Core's yum on a SUSE Linux 10.0 system, which is officially supported from 10.0 on. The article shows a short comparison of yum and yast as well as the problems yum still has because some servers still do not have yum support.

The debate over whether or not RISC OS should be open sourced took another turn this week when Peter Naulls argued that "certain parts" of the OS could be released under an open source licence. The State-side coder behind various ports including Firefox said this would ideally include "crucial parts that affect all users, even if they don't realise it, parts that can be created from scratch and made much better than the Acorn original, and parts which can managed by specific developers who already understand them well."

"Today just so happens to mark the third birthday of Microsoft's Media Center Edition of Windows XP, which is likely why the company is rolling out a major update to the MCE product. Dubbed Rollup 2, the update is available to current WMC customers via Windows Update. Will you want it?"

A Microsoft patch meant to fix critical security flaws in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is causing trouble for some users, the company said Friday.

The Open Source Development Labs, an industry consortium devoted to improving Linux, plans to launch an initiative Monday to bring the open-source operating system to mobile phones.

Microsoft is poised to release to testers the second Community Technology Preview release of Vista, paving the way for a second full-fledged beta, which is now expected in December. Among the new features which could find their way into the updated build are a number of IE 7.0 enhancements; the resurrected "Sidebar" task pane; Windows Media Player 11.0; and new networking functionality.

"This Release Candidate is a pre-release version of the .NET Framework v2.0 (x86|x64) redistributable package. The Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0 Release Candidate installs the .NET Framework runtime and associated files required to run applications developed to target the .NET Framework v2.0."

The ClearQuest plug-in for Eclipse enables you to perform ClearQuest activities (tasks) in an Eclipse environment. While many of you are familiar with Rational ClearQuest and/or Eclipse, this article is aimed at bridging the gap to provide you with a good understanding of the ClearQuest Client for Eclipse. For ClearQuest fans, this is an offer that is hard to refuse - save a significant amount with this sepcial deal on Rational ClearQuest Licenses.

For all you .NET Compact Framework developers out there who are still wondering about what's coming up in the next release of Visual Studio and the .NET CF, here is a list of recent articles at Developer.com.