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.

I recently bought a Mac Mini, And I thought I'd talk about my experiences in the transition from Windows XP to Mac OS X.

Over the past few years SATA has become a standard interface on hard drives and is starting to show up in many peripheral devices. Today we're taking a look at two similar hard drives to see if there's a performance difference between SATA and the older Parallel IDE standard.

Microsoft has released the first beta of Windows Server 2003 R2. "Windows Server 2003 R2 release candidate software is available to download for evaluation in both x64 and x86 versions. Windows Server 2003 R2 RC0 software cannot be installed on anything other than software versions of Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1." More information can be found here.

"Due to being dissatisfied with the inability of existing open source Continuous Integration solutions to prevent developers from abusing the codebase, I've been prototyping a new proactive approach to Continuous Integration. Sin, a framework for Continuous Integration, is the result of this work. I discuss the problems with existing solutions and the advantages of Sin here."

"I've written a lengthy article covering what I learned during the last two years building the Xegl display server. Topics include the current X server, framebuffer, Xgl, graphics drivers, multiuser support, using the GPU, and a new display server design. Hopefully it will help you fill in the pieces and build an overall picture of the graphics landscape."

According to Paul Thurrot, Microsft is planning on releasing Vista to manufacturing on August 9th, 2006, with broad market availbility on November 15th of that year. Beta 2, RC0 and RC1 will be released, respectivily, December 7th (2005), April 19th (2006) and June 28th (2006). All this also applies to Vista Server, with the exception that Server's RTM is scheduled for Januray 10th, 2007. WinFS is supposed to be released in Q3 2007. All these release dates are ahead of schedule.

For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer's connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren't in place.

The WinFS rumors were true: Microsoft has posted for download by its Microsoft Developer Network subscribers a first beta of its next-generation WinFS file system. While many developers were not expecting Microsoft to release a Beta 1 build of the technology until late 2006, Microsoft officials said on Monday that getting early bits to testers before Windows Vista shipped was actually the plan of record since last year. Update: Channel9 has a video of WinFS (WMV).

A new issue of the Linux-Mobile-Guide is available. This guide covers laptop, notebook, PDA and mobile (cell) phone related Linux features, such as installation methods (via network interface, without CD/DVD drive, etc.), hardware features (PCMCIA, IrDA, BlueTooth, APM, ACPI, etc.) and configurations for different environments.

To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Opera is throwing an online 'party' and as part of that a special treat is free registration keys for all platforms for Opera from a page on the party area of the site.

Apple updates Safari to 2.01, the site says improved website support. You can download this update via Software Update. My Take: I downloaded the update. Due to server load haven't been able to test the image of doom, will be a shame if that problem is still there.

Feelin has been ported to AROS. Feelin is an object-oriented system for AmigaOS as described on their website. It provides a GUI toolkit that looks polished (screenshot). The AROS Archives is up and ready to accept your files. This web site will be the main repository for all AROS software.

IBM's Developerworks website has published an outstanding free tutorial (free reg. req.) introducing hackers to the Linux source. "This tutorial is written for Linux or UNIX programmers whose skills and experience are at a beginning to intermediate level. You should have a general familiarity with using a UNIX command-line shell and a working knowledge of the C language."