More details are leaking out about the Debian Core Consortium, which will be announced at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The public relations manager of desktop Linux vendor Linspire, Heather MacKenzie, revealed that the "the DCC's official name is the Debian Common Core Alliance."

"One of the new additions of Fedora Core 4 is a natively compiled version of Eclipse. I took it for a spin to see if it is a suitable replacement for 'regular' Eclipse."

Lately, rumours had been popping up that Palm's new Treo 670 would be running Windows Mobile 5 --however, no hard evidence confirming these rumours ever appeared. Until now. This is a major blow to PalmSource. More pictures here. Note that this does not mean the device will ship with Windows Mobile 5 --it just means it can run it.

In the last few days, KDE developers have been actively discussing usability issues for KDE 4. Here are some thoughts, and some more are here. What do you think?

Bart Smaalders of Sun Microsystems has open sourced libmicro, a portable set of microbenchmarks designed to measure performance of basic system calls and library functions. This framework proved invaluable during Solaris 10 development as a way of identifying areas where performance was lagging behind other Operating Systems, as well regressions between Solaris builds. You can join the libmicro discussion at the OpenSolaris forums.

So, you are not sure what makes a Linux distribution a good desktop Linux but you know it when you see it, right? Perhaps but perhaps not. So, what does it take to be a good desktop Linux distribution?

There may not be fireworks. CIOs and IT directors may not be heaping their proprietary software on bonfires and dancing. Even so, the open source revolution is happening right now and will carry the day, said Bill Weinberg, open source architecture specialist and Linux evangelist for OSDL.

UIMA 1.1 is a pure Java SDK that supports the implementation, composition, and deployment of applications working with unstructured information on Linux. Version 1.1 has been incorporated into IBM's enterprise search product, WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, Version 8.2.2. UIMA Annotators can now be deployed into WebSphere II OmniFind for semantic search solutions. Here's a helpful user guide.

Bill Weinberg, OSDL Linux evangelist and speaker at next week's LinuxWorld conference, discusses the state of Linux adoption and its ongoing rivalry with Windows.

The CEO of cluster software vendor Scali takes issue with Microsoft's clustering options. Scali is demonstrating a new, major upgrade to its Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect suites at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo.

This could be completely faked, but engadget has a screenshot of OSX x68 running on the x86 virtual machine VMWare. It's an interesting feat if its true, but it also has other implications. Since VMWare obviously does not implement any of the various DRM schemes, this would poke holes in the assertion that Apple is using Trusted Computing in its developer boxes.

This article covers the various forms of wireless data transmission, and addresses the main security problems in WiFi today.

Over at IsComputerOn, an article discusses with Axel Dörfler, the Haiku move for the FreeBSD network stack. Also talked about is the thought of using ReiserFS instead of BFS.

The news that Apple is going to switch to Intel processors shook up the computing world. Many users and developers were eager to publish their opinions on the switch. However, one group of people were totally neglected during all this: resellers. Today, we feature an interview with Wim Schermer, first Dutchman to own a Mac (in 1984), and co-founder of one of the biggest Apple retail stores in The Netherlands, MacSupport. We discuss the switch to Intel, and much more.