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.

Intentionally or not, Linspire may be trying to become the "Education Linux" distribution. The desktop Linux software maker, formerly known as Lindows, Thursday launched a new, low-cost licensing program for schools who wish to install a Linux desktop operating system as an alternative to the more expensive Microsoft Windows operating system.

"This page describes the installation I did with the clubmember download dvd of Mandriva Linux 2006 Powerpack." And, "This page describes how I configure Mandriva on my systems." Maybe not for the advanced Linux users, but still very much interesting for the unexperienced Linux users among us.

We will try to get a GPRS internet connection using Linux-based phones as modems and route the connection to Mac OS X via Bluetooth. This guide is for Mac OS X, the US Cingular GPRS service only (other providers might work out of the box with the phone, others might not at all -- you never know with GPRS) and any of the Linux-based Motorola smartphones like the A760, A780, E680/i etc (they are all identical regarding their 'modem' functionality).

OpenSolaris has started branching into the mobile computing domain. That's a notable step given that Solaris is generally designed for much more powerful servers. The OpenSolaris Laptop Community website was launched earlier this month. It features support for Atheros' 802.11b/g wireless networking chip and said that drivers for Intel's wireless chips is "being evaluated." In addition, Sun engineers are working on adding Solaris support for various power-saving techniques important to the battery-constrained world of mobile computing.

"The Porting Team is proud to announce to the Ubuntu world the release of Breezy Badger for three shiny new architectures. The addition of IA64, HPPA (1.1 and later, here) and SPARC (UltraSPARC only, tftpboot/netinstall|cdboot/netinstall) will make Ubuntu available to communities sometimes neglected by other distributions." Please note that the links point to files directly.

Pier Luigi Fiorini is the lead developer of Mockup. Mockup is an open source effort to create a modern desktop operating system. It is based on Linux 2.6 and supports native POSIX threading, hardware detection, automatic device creation and automatic network configuration. The user interface, written using Qt 4, runs on Xorg, but will also support the framebuffer in future versions. Read on for an interview. Note that Fiorini is not a native English speaker, so forgive any spelling/grammar errors.