Solaris Express Community Release build 20 is out. You can download it here. It should be available on the OpenSolaris page soon. In addition, Sun Cluster 3.1 8/05 has been released. More info here.

If you're writing production code in Ruby and haven't been exposed to optimization strategies, take a look at this tutorial. Learn how to profile and optimize Ruby code (free reg. req.) with RubyInline and ZenOptimize, two tools that make this process easier.

This bootable ISO image contains NetBSD 3.99.7 and allows you to boot NetBSD/i386 -current without having to install to a hard disk. The LiveCD was initially intended to be a rescue cdrom, but is now capable of much more. KDE-3.4.2 and all kde3-i18n packages were included.

Here's a review of SuSE 9.3: "Right now I'm looking at a SuSE 9.3 installation which offers me everything I'm used to plus more. It's hard to say if and when I'll switch, but it sure looks tempting. In more than one way SuSE feels so much better than Ubuntu, and it's hard to resist all the small details and finishes Novell put into the product."

This is the 4th installment of a series of guides to configuring and installing PC-BSD. The past 3 parts can be found here. In this part of the guide they cover installing Amarok, Limewire, Azureus and Streamtuner.

"OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt has bumped the version identifier from 3.7-current to 3.8-beta in CVS HEAD. Now is an especially good time to test snapshots."

A British executive for Sun said on Friday that the release date for the company's StarOffice 8 suite would now be September 12, almost two months later than originally anticipated. The office productivity software sees wide use in the Linux community, and includes word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Graphics hardware has grown from a simple display controller to a full fledged specialized processing unit, in the last 10 years. The amount of included memory has increased from a mere few Kilobytes to hundreds of Megabytes. But what other uses can be found for your videocard when you’re not playing a game or using the latest CAD package?

After a few months of quiet activity, the Appeal desktop project has rolled out a new project website that documents what everyone has been up to and discussing. Since the the last public announcement many things have occurred, including another Appeal meeting being held in Germany. The project is looking forward to sharing its experiences and gathering input from the general KDE developer community at aKademy 2005 later this month.

Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software Lab serves as both a place to examine the threat posed to Microsoft products by open-source offerings and a venue for testing software from Microsoft and others that's designed to span that divide. The lab is home to hundreds of servers and desktops that run dozens of different types of Linux and Unix. Here are photos of the lab.

Entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins has left his palm prints all over the high-tech industry. After selling off two high-profile companies, the creator of the PalmPilot handheld computer and the Treo smart phone now works as chief technology officer at PalmOne Inc., the corporation that now churns out both those products. BizJournals interviews him.

Researchers at IBM are testing software that would let you tote your home or office desktop around on an iPod or similar portable device so that you could run it on any PC. The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from a x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer's display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk.

"It looks like the first part of my KDE 3.5 previews was extremely popular. Much more than I could ever anticipated. I even got Slashdotted. Anyway, here is the second part of the look into KDE's near future. Enjoy the tour!"

Kellen wrote a nice introduction to incremental encrypted backups which might be useful to Linux users who've never setup anything similar. Often Encryption isn't given a lot of focus when creating remote backups; but if you don't trust the remote host it is essential.