Th first release candidate of FreeBSD 6.0 has been released to ftp. As of yet, there are no announcements or release notes. Be sure to use a mirror.

Microsoft is nearing a settlement of RealNetworks' long-running antitrust lawsuit with a deal valued at $750 million (E624 million), according to reports. Under terms of the settlement, which could still fall through, Microsoft would offer a combination of cash and promotions for RealNetworks' music and game services through Microsoft's online services and software, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. In addition, the newspaper said, the two companies would collaborate on technology initiatives in the future. Update: It's official.

This humorous article depicts the computing world without Microsoft-- Apple has the biggest marketshare (15%), HP bought Commodore, IBM thinks text-based interfaces are the best thing for customers, and hardware-accelerated 3D is a no-go because all the various parties cannot agree on a standard. And Microsoft? Aren't they selling BASIC?

"Yesterday, I was among a few lucky journalists in New York City who got a rare chance to play a collection of new games on the eagerly awaited Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console. In short, I was impressed. The brain, capable of one teraflop, is three symmetrical IBM cores running at 3.2 GHz each. Stellar graphics performance is provided by a 500 MHz custom ATI graphics processor and backed up by super fast memory, 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM that is shared with the CPUs via a unified memory architecture."

The group behind the OpenDocument standard has submitted the document format to a key standards organization, a move that could make open-source desktop applications more attractive to governments. OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, said it has submitted the standard to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Here is an interview with Bill Buck and Raquel Velasco of Genesi, the company behind the PowerPC G4 Open Desktop Workstation. They talk about MorphOS, Java, the ODW, future plans for the ODW, and much more.

"The third annual LinuxFest was held on Saturday, October 1 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. It's the first time I attended this one day conference so I didn't know what to expect. Overall, I found it to be an interesting and generally well-planned affair with a good balance of informative presentations, relevant vendor displays, and some general Linux geek fun."

"Xcode is a powerful professional tool that allows you to perform the most common software development tasks simply, quickly, and in a way that should be familiar. Its capabilities, however, are much more powerful than what is needed to build just a single type of application. Xcode is designed to let you build any kind of software product you can dream of. From Cocoa and Carbon applications to kernel extensions and Spotlight importers, Xcode is up to the task."

Mobile-review reviews a great product, the Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100, which only comes short on its lack of integrated WiFi & Bluetooth. Update: Another Zaurus review.

The Microsoft exec in charge of Office has dismissed last week's tie-up between Sun and Google as allusion rather than substance. "That announcement didn't have anything," Chris Capossela, corporate vice president Information Worker Product Management Group of Microsoft told a crowd of reporters last week. "It had something about a toolbar and Java Runtime, and it alluded to a potential thing some time in the future. OpenOffice isn’t hard to get, just go to their website and download the software."

The Open Document Fellowship was launched to add momentum to what appears to be a growing movement to support the open standard for the production, storage and dissemination of documents.

GNOME developers are making various changes to the open source desktop environment that should make it more suitable for embedded environments. Future versions of GNOME will include improved compatibility with styluses and performance enhancements, according to GNOME Foundation director Murray Cumming on Friday. This will include a focus on the GTK+, a toolkit used by GNOME to create graphical user interfaces.

There are over 300 distributions listed on DistroWatch.com, but Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, maintained that choice and specialization outweighed any advantage that might be gained by focusing customer attention on a smaller number of offerings.

Firefox is a relatively new Web browser and currently the most popular browser built on the Mozilla platform. Users like the security and convenience features it offers. Developers like the Firefox attention to standards compliance, inherited from its Mozilla roots. The most recent version, Firefox 1.5 (currently in beta), comes with many features for XML developers.