Office 12: Microsoft Pumps up Productivity Platform

Microsoft 50 Comments
While Office 12, Microsoft's next-generation desktop suite, is not expected to hit Beta 1 until later this fall, Microsoft officials are set to show off a number of its components at the company's annual Professional Developers Conference in mid-September. Recent developer conferences have focused almost exclusively on operating system and tools futures. But this year's will include dozens of tracks aimed at Office developers and users.
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RISC OS 3D Graphics Driver Released

  Submitted by fylfot RISC OS 8 Comments
Simon Wilson has released the first public version of his 3D graphics driver for Iyonix users. The software library, ported from BeOS and compatible with the popular OpenGL interface, employs the Nvidia PCI graphics card used in the XScale powered Iyonix. OpenGL based applications built with Simon's port should enjoy hardware accelerated graphics, thanks to the modest GeForece 2 MX card which, until now, has been left unutilised under RISC OS.
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DragonFly To Switch to pkgsrc Officially

  Submitted by ghen FreeBSD 31 Comments
Matt Dillon has announced that the next release of DragonFly BSD will use NetBSD's pkgsrc as its official package management system, instead of "dfports" (FreeBSD's Ports with DragonFly overrides), which had already been abandoned by developers in favour of pkgsrc over the last few months. pkgsrc is a portable package management system, developed by NetBSD, and supports DragonFly officially since October 2004.
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Microsoft Nixes SFU, Integrates SFU with Server 2003 R2

  Submitted by ajam Windows 38 Comments
Microsoft plans to build more Unix features into future versions of its Windows Server operating system and cease work on its separate Services For Unix product. Microsoft plans to include some of those features in Windows Server 2003 R2, an update to the server OS due at the end of this year. At the same time, the company said it is not planning any further releases of the standalone Services For Unix product. DiStasio, a director in the Windows Server unit, said the plan is to build Unix tools into releases beyond R2 as well, but he did not rule out that there might be some tools offered separate from the OS.
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OpenGEM ‘Project Liberation’ Beta 3 Released

  Submitted by Shane Coughlan OS News 16 Comments
"There is a new member of the OpenGEM family. We'd like to introduce Project Liberation, based on the software behind OpenGEM Experimental. Project Liberation is a whole new type of OpenGEM, and it's such a leap forward it'll blow your socks off. Project Liberation has a new 3D interface, with a neat modern pointer set, a beautiful new default system font, and cool new icons." Beta 3 has just been released. Download it here.
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Microsoft Holding Its Ground on Office for Linux

Microsoft 114 Comments
Some prominent figures in the Linux community believe that as enterprises increase their use of Linux on the desktop, Microsoft will be forced to consider offering a version of Office for Linux. "When the market share gets to a certain point, Microsoft will, just as it did with Apple in the past, make Office available on Linux," CEO Stuart Cohen of OSDL said in an interview. My take: Mr. Cohen is forgetting two important things: Excel was first released for the Mac (1985) and Word wasn't popular until MS ported it from DOS to Mac (1985).
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Introduction to the Xen Virtual Machine

OS News 28 Comments
This article is intended mainly for developers who are new to Xen and who want to know more about it. The Xen VMM (virtual machine monitor) is an open-source project that is being developed in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK. It enables us to create many virtual machines, each of which runs an instance of an operating system. These guest operating systems can be a patched Linux kernel, version 2.4 or 2.6, or a patched NetBSD/FreeBSD kernel.
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IBM Sponsored Study: Linux Less Expensive

  Submitted by Tyr. In the News 33 Comments
Two research reports sponsored by IBM argue that Linux is less expensive to buy and operate than Windows or Unix. The first paper claims Linux is 40% less expensive than a comparable x86-based Windows server and 54% less than a comparable Sparc-based Solaris server. The second that using Linux has "Second Stage Benefits" such as attracting IT workers, among whome open source is increasingly popular.
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The Final 72 Hours of Blastwave?

  Submitted by James Solaris 27 Comments
"I need to ask the Blastwave and OpenSolaris communities for your help. Despite my best efforts at gathering corporate sponsorship, Blastwave is once again in a financial crisis. We are due to be evicted from the datacenter in three days, and there is little that I can do personally to stop this." You can help out by donating, and while doing that you can also participate in this survey set up to estimate the size of the Blastwave community.
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Freespire Agrees to Name Change, Linspire Gives Out Free Copies

Linspire 54 Comments
In a short story with a happy ending, the developer of a free version of Linspire called Freespire has agreed to change the name of his project, and Linspire is offering free copies of Linspire Linux for a few days. Freespire, which first popped up on Distrowatch last week, described itself as a free variant of Linspire Linux, with proprietary components and trademarks removed.
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