"Every now and again I like to spend a while becoming really familiar with the various tools which I use frequently. This week I spent several hours experimenting with the various paging applications available to Debian users. Here is my guide to the common pagers, and what they can do."

Palm opened its first retail store in the Bay Area this week (Stanford, Palo Alto). OSNews was there today and we are sharing our quick look at it via pictures, here and here.

"Now that Firefox has become the first viable contender to Internet Explorer in years, its popularity has brought with it some unwanted attention. Last week's premature disclosure of a zero-day Firefox exploit came a few weeks after a zero-day exploit for Internet Explorer appeared on the Internet. Firefox not only has more vulnerabilities per month than Internet Explorer, but it is now surpassing Internet Explorer for the number of exploits available for public download in recent months." Note: Read this article, and especially the update, carefully before commenting.

Mandriva Linux 2006 RC2 has been released. You can read the release notes here, download locations are underneath the release notes. This will be the last RC before 2006 goes final.

The BSD Certification Group are running a new survey: the BSD Usage Survey. This survey aims to collect detailed statistics on how and where BSD systems are used around the world. The survey is short - only 19 questions - and should only take a few minutes to complete.

"There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's a topic of public concern and a "safe issue" for politicians, we can expect a flood of computer security-related legislation from lawmakers. So: computer security is definitely still a "hot topic." But why are we spending all this time and money and still having problems?"

Mac OS X provides a kernel extension mechanism as a means of allowing dynamic loading of pieces of code into the kernel, without the need to recompile. These pieces of code are known generically as plug-ins or, in the Darwin kernel, as kernel extensions or KEXTs.

The framework is intentionally designed to support only the basic functionality, as it will ultimately be used to support many RAID controllers. Theo explains, "the functionality supplied is also very basic, almost minimal. But this is done like this on purpose, since we believe that we could support this functionality on all RAID controllers in the same way, without special 'but that controller is so different' mindsets entering the picture. RAID management should (and can be) be no more complicated than ifconfig managing network interfaces."

While Dell recommends the use of Windows XP Professional, in France Dell and Mandriva have announced the availability of a Dell laptop preloaded with Mandriva Linux. This is the first time any Dell laptop with pre-installed Linux has been sold or supported by Dell. Previously, only Dell N-Series Precision Workstations with Red Hat Linux were available from Dell.

Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows Server, on Thursday shed some light on the upcoming Windows Server 2003 R2 release during his keynote address at the Professional Developers Conference here. R2, which is due later this year, would bring features such as Services for Unix, the WS-Management standard, along with the next generation of the management console, MMC 3.0.

Apple's PowerMac line will see an upgrade in the near future, possibly before the close of the month. IBM's July announcement noted that the PowerPC 970MP would be available in speeds of 1.4GHz to 2.5GHz. Apple is expected to adopt the 970MP at least at the high-end of the new Power Mac G5 line. So, what are your thoughts on the 970MP? Does it nullify Apple's reasoning behind the switch to Intel? Also note the low-power G5 IBM has released alongside the 970MP.

Vista's development tools use cross-platform standards, so you can use them to write normal apps that will run on multiple platforms or Web-based apps with multiple browser support. Also, new security features planned for the Vista version of Windows Server will include an automatic patch check and a file system that can fix itself, Microsoft said. Watch some videos of Vista here.

Palm has revolutionized the PDA industry. In 1996, it released the Pilot and in less than ten years, sold 38 million devices outfitted with Palm OS. Read about the development of the Pilot (and the ill-fated Casio Zoomer and Graffiti for Newton) here.

Red Hat has been working on an adaptation of Multi Level Security called Multi Category Security which is planned to be enabled by default on FC 5 along with other security enhancements