Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 3 was quietly released on Tuesday. No mention of the release is as of yet posted at MandrivaLinux, but a 3 ISO set and a Mini CD are available for download. You can read the changelog, and there's also a review available (screenshots included).

"Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit for Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 1. This edition provides documentation, samples, header files, libraries, and tools designed to help you develop applications and libraries that target Windows Vista Beta 1."

Intel said that it plans later this year to offer test versions of software tools aimed at allowing Mac developers to improve the performance of programs that run on its chips. The software maker said that later this year it will offer beta versions of both its compiler and its performance libraries, which contain code optimised for both digital media and scientific computing tasks.

Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced an update to the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for October 2005; NetBSD 2.1 for the middle of September 2005. These dates are of course subject to change.

One of the longest running Eclipse projects, a fully-functioning IDE for Eclipse 3.1, has a new release out. The CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) Project just recently released 3.0, with a bunch of new improvements.

Start-up XenSource has succeeded in booting Microsoft Windows on top of Xen software, an important milestone in its effort to commercialize the virtual machine.

The challenger has called for a "shoot-out" over whose dual-core chip performs better. Question is, can it shake Intel's corporate dominance?

It's been two months since Steve Jobs announced that Apple Computer was going with Intel processors, and in that time, Apple's transition toolkit has made its way into the hands of the Macintosh cognoscenti. And in that time, it's become clear that this transition will likely be the easiest of all those yet experienced by Apple developers.

This week in Arch Linux's news letter there was an interview with Ion's creator Tuomo Valkonen. Ion is a complete desktop environment built on the tiling windowmanager PWM. It uses Lua as an embedded interpreter which handles all of the configuration. It mainly uses the keyboard to access the functions but also supports the mouse for some things.

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based servers from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's XR9 systems use the same G5 chip as Xserve, but at 2.4GHz, the chips are slightly faster than those used in Apple's servers.

In Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization and prepared the system for the user. These venerable programs are widely used by system adminstrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd.

Confusion, fear, procrastination; these are words often associated with making decisions about IT security and as threats become more sophisticated it is easy to see why. The increasing popularity for workforce mobility have made detecting and eliminating threats purely from within the corporate network alone an inadequate approach to network security.

The antitrust regulator in South Korea will begin a crucial hearing on Tuesday (Monday evening US time) to determine whether Microsoft violated the country's fair trade rules by bundling its instant messenger and Media Player programs into its Windows XP platform. Officials have been reticent about whether the regulator, the Fair Trade Commission, will rule on the case after a closed hearing of two days. The commission held a closed hearing in July to listen to arguments from Microsoft and its local competitors, but it has not clarified how many more hearings it will need before ruling.

Modifying memory functions is never easy on an operating system, as a problem with memory affects everything in the system. OpenBSD developers have put out a call to help testing a new memory management system for the upcoming 3.8 release, which is tentitively set to be released this October.