"Microsoft is right on schedule with this month's Windows Vista CTP. We had to really pull some strings to get this release slightly ahead of schedule, but we managed it and it's our pleasure to bring you our initial analysis of the new build, titled 5231. It's becoming clear that Microsoft is serious about Vista, as it keeps getting better with every CTP release."

A rather ambitious new FreeBSD-derived distribution called BSD-HALO is currently in the planning and proof of concept stages. Amongst other things, one of the biggest goals is to attempt to produce a virus, malware, and exploit resistant environment. UI will also be a major design factor, and some pre-alpha screenshots can be viewed on the site as well.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.5 of their cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. All software is carefully packaged for easy deployment on 19 different Unix platforms, including FreeBSD 4.11/5.4/6.0/7.0, NetBSD 2.0.2, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora Core 4, SUSE Linux 9.3/10.0, Mandriva Linux 10.2 and Sun Solaris 8/9/10. The major technical efforts for this release were spent on migrating to GCC 4.0, further improving the Solaris 10, FreeBSD 6.0 and SUSE 10.0 support.

Our short survey will take about two minutes to complete, and one survey respondent will win an iPod Nano for his or her trouble. Start here.

GnomeFiles.org (OSNews' sister site & GTK+ software repository) is celebrating 1000 applications added to its database. Since GnomeFiles' launch 1.5 years ago the site grew enormously and it now serves more than 22,000 web pages per day on average and it includes a recently improved version for mobile browsers (optimized for PDAs & smartphones, plain phones should be using its WAP version).

The most popular PDA web browser, AvantGo, today announced the beta release of new RSS features in its mobile Internet service. The new features give users greater ease-of-use for viewing mobile RSS subscriptions online or offline, and expands the content available through AvantGo. If your phone or PDA doesn't have an AvantGo client port, you can always use the web-based version through any other browser. OSNews and GnomeFiles have both AvantGo support (after creating a channel for them on your personal my.avantgo.com page) and they render well on small screens automatically.

This article shows you how to obtain the best performance from SDO and the JDBC DMS, by keep your metadata models as small as possible, ensuring that the most efficient SQL queries are being used, and by using static SDO models whenever possible.

In its first update to a new community-based preview program, Microsoft is showing off a number of new features for Windows Vista, including efforts to improve the web browser and make the operating system more resilient.

Microsoft has confirmed plans to bundle anti-spyware protection into Windows Vista, a move that is sure to raise eyebrows among competitors and possibly antitrust regulators. "The core Windows AntiSpyware functionality gets built in," said Greg Sullivan, lead Windows product manager. "For unmanaged environments, home and small business users, we want to provide base-level security services."

"Living in New Zealand, RISC OS user Peter Noble uses his RiscPC and Videodesk to edit film and produce presentations and videos for friends and family. Here, he talks us through how he typically puts together a short video."

Adobe, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, RealNetworks and Red Hat are all backing the new Linux standards effort led by the Free Standards Group. The nonprofit organisation plans to marshal their resources to form standards for key components of Linux desktop software, including libraries, application runtime and install time. The group said Monday that it will encourage software developers to use its guidelines when building programs for Linux as part of its Linux Standard Base project.

KDE 3.5 Beta 2 will be released later today has been released. The Klax live-CD has already been updated to ship with this new beta release. You can download this beta's source code yourself from the KDE download page. Updated by AS: Screenshots!

Microsoft on Monday came closer to the final release of Windows Server 2003 R2, expected before the year's end, by making Release Candidate 1 available for download. The release of the RC1 code, which is available here, follows the release of RC0, in late August.

Sun on Monday began selling its highest-end Unix servers with new 1.5GHz UltraSPARC IV+ chips. Sun used its milestones and monster servers as fodder for bashing IBM, which recently began a Unix server upgrade. IBM has slotted the Power5+ chips into low-end systems but won't give higher-end servers the same boost until 2006. Even then, IBM isn't expected to have a system comparable in size to the E25K.