Developers continue to debate the question of memory management solutions. Which is best? Although Objective-C's retain/release runs smoother and faster than Java's garbage collection, it places a much larger burden on the developer and introduces a much larger risk of memory leaks.

"As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how works."

Two interesting newsbits from the PPC world. Firstly, Genesi has announced that it will develop a dual 970MP (dual-core G5) server, named Open Server Workstation, following their Open Desktop Workstation. Secondly, Freescale has said that their dual-core G4 processors have been delayed until the second half of 2006. Update: "Libfreevec is a free (LGPL) library with hand-optimized replacement routines for GLIBC, such as memcpy(), strlen(), etc. These routines have been written specifically to take advantage of the AltiVec, and will only work on processors that include this unit."

Today, I had the opportunity to speak with Iyer Venkatesan, Product line manager for StarOffice at Sun Microsystems. He spoke to me at length about StarOffice 8, which will be released tomorrow. Read on for a summary of the interview, and be sure to check out the review at Newsforge as well.

"Ubuntu never positioned itself as a Debian derivative, like Xandros, Mepis, or Knoppix. Ubuntu publicly acknowledges its relationship with Debian, and Canonical, through its recently founded Ubuntu foundation, hires some Debian developers. All this should be good news; but for some it's not. Whether on Distrowatch or on forums, voices whisper that Ubuntu has a dirty secret you may not want to hear: they don't keep the compatibility with Debian, and they want to fork away from their mother distribution."

"I have noticed these days that the computer market is either falling into some sort of dictatorship or some other power of influence that is forcing the computer market into a no choice market where the choice is handpicked by either some monopoly or by a misperception made by the wrong decision makers in today's computer industry. The computer market of today as we know it is being prefabricated by influence while hypnotizing the public of that influence."

Amanith Framework is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, Mac OX X, FreeBSD, Linux and IRIX) open source C++ framework for 2D and 3D vector graphics. The new 0.1.1 release adds support for 64bit. New supported environments are Linux x86_64 (with gcc) and Windows XP 64 (with Visual Studio .Net 2005).

"We chat to Gnome and OpenOffice.org coder Michael Meeks about all things Linux. Here's a few of the questions we asked the Novell employee."

The end of the world is near. At last that of the Unix world. That's the prediction of Donald Feinberg, vice-president of Gartner. "Linux is coming, Unix is dead." But there's no need to panic. Not just yet. The end is not going to come overnight or even in next week or year, but it is certain, or as he puts it, "an absolute".

A new release candidate of NetBSD 2.1 is now available for testing, 2.1-RC5.

"Version 0.8.2 is now available, with some important bugfixes and changes. This update adds SMP support to the system, for our multi-processor friends, as well as fixing an issue with "mountroot", after performing an installation. Please see the changelog for a full description of the changes. People running 0.8.1 need not download the full ISO again, since the update to 0.8.2 is available as on Online Update, through the PC-BSD update manager." Read the release notes, and download here.

"Earlier in the week, I conducted a lengthy phone interview with Aaron Seigo about the Open Source Desktop Workshop being held in San Diego on October 13th and 14th. Fast approaching, we discuss the workshop's inception, target audience and expectations."

According to the Cola Coder, an upcoming update to ZETA 1.0 will enable booting from USB devices. This will not only allow installation of ZETA on laptops that do not have an optical drive, but it will also make it possible to install to and run ZETA from a USB memory stick.

"This is a detailed description about the steps to be taken to setup a Ubuntu based server (Ubuntu 5.0.4 - The Hoary Hedgehog) that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (web server (SSL-capable), mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/POP3s/IMAP/IMAPs, Quota, Firewall, etc.)."