Xandros Business Edition provides a desktop environment, Xandros is easy to install and maintain. As an added bonus, Xandros Business Edition includes the full edition of CrossOver Office 4.2. That means that if there is a major Windows software package that you can't live without, chances are you will be able to install and run it on Xandros through CrossOver. Read the full review at NewsForge.

One of the advantages of OS X's BSD heritage (via Darwin) is that it has access to all the scripting languages found in UNIX(-like) OSes. Here's an introduction to open source scripting.

Singularity is a research project at Microsoft to write an OS using managed code. Although it will probably never be seen out in the wild, it incorporates some interesting ideas nonetheless. Read about it here and here (ppt).

"Fans of BeOS still mourn its untimely demise all these years after the release of R5 and subsequent sale of its assets to Palm. Now ZETA, a successor to BeOS, has been released. Naturally, we had to review it."

KDE 3.5 Alpha source tarballs are up on the FTP servers. This release is "really alpha quality", so no big announcement is planned. To get this release, you can either use Konstruct, or download the Klax KDE 3.5 Alpha Live-CD. Update: Here's a screenshot gallery of this release.

The company behind the Palm operating system, PalmSource, has just signed a technology partnership agreement with Montavista Software. Montavista, which specialises in GNU/Linux systems for wireless devices, is best known for its Mobilinux products for mobile phones.

Opera released a mini/lite version of their 8.0.1 browser for all Java-enabled phones. On a similar note, the current leader of mobile phone browsers with 52% of market share, Openwave Systems, shipped one billion handsets with their browser in it.

"After over a year of work, my C/C++ Source Code Search website is finally live! It allows you to search over 107 million lines of open source C/C++ code and it actually understands the C/C++ syntax thus giving better results. I'm currently adding 2 to 3 million lines of new code per day."

The first draft of the next version of the General Public License should be released for public comments in early 2006, according to a key player in the effort to modernize the foundation of the free and open-source programming movements.

"Windows Vista is actually quite interesting for an administrator. When I first saw it on MSDN, I thought, "Over 2 Gig's. What could they have done for it to be that large without the drastic new UI?" Well, I have been looking at this thing for about a week now and I uncover more and more each time that I look into it. I am going to cover some of the enhancements that Vista will provide for administrators as well as a few neat little tidbits that I have not seen much of."

Despite their best attempts, Linux software companies say they are still having a hard time luring average consumers away from the Windows environment--but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Novell's vice president: "(Linux on the desktop) is not the sexy story that it used to be. However, there are some very steady and irreversible trends."

Red Hat's announcement that it is adding network and system monitoring to Red Hat Network isn't that much of a surprise. More unexpected is Red Hat's decision to support Solaris with it. In other news, the Fedora Foundation has been delayed.

When you install a new Linux server distribution, you can often install all of the daemons you'll need to run on that machine at install time. Distribution vendors present a "ready to go" distribution by supplying initialization scripts for all of the services you might run. But what happens if you're building from source, and no init script is supplied? What if you're writing the source and haven't ever built an init script? Here are a few ways to cope when you're faced with this challenge.

Andy Martin of The Committee to Fight Microsoft on Tuesday announced his intentions to block Microsoft from releasing its Windows Vista operating system. Martin intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free of bugs that could result in security vulnerabilities. He argues that no company in America gets away with selling a "defective" product the way Microsoft does.