The phrase "de facto standard" can denote anything from proprietary tyranny to a healthy, vibrant, market. What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization? Should you use such informal standards, or ignore them?

Red Hat on Friday began testing support for forthcoming dual-core processors in its first update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, software.

"Microsoft aims to kill BlackBerry," an insider told CRN. "Every corporate type has a BlackBerry, and they all have Outlook. What is the cost going to be to RIM Server when Exchange Service Pack and Magneto come out and they're not priced? Microsoft is giving it away for free." Read the article at TheRegister. On a related PDA note, this is the best PDA deal on the web judging from the feature-set and extra free accessories included (note: we are not affiliated with that shop in any way). There is also a hack available to update that Dell Axim X5-Advanced model to Windows Mobile 2003.

Trolltech has released the second and final beta version of Qt 4. You can download it from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. The online Qt Reference Documentation has been updated. Qt 4 is currently scheduled for final release in late Q2, 2005, with an intermediate Release Candidate planned for May.

Being the best doesn't always mean being the most popular. We all know of many inferior products that are immensely, sometimes perplexingly, popular. However, this does not mean that one must forsake the pursuit of excellence when pursuing a broad market share. As proponents of open source software, it should not be beneath us to pursue popularity or to look to proprietary developers as examples. And by following the right examples, we can help spread the usage of open source software without sacrificing the goal of software excellence, says NewsForge.

Linare Pro is a commercial GNU/Linux distribution based on Fedora Core. It is themed to look and feel like WinXP and aims to be a full-featured well-integrated desktop OS. Read its review at NewsForge. OSNews also learned that the very affordable Linare laptops are selling extremely well via Wal-Mart.

Today, Apple Computer announced the release date of MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger." Tiger will hit shelves on Friday, April 29.

With some free time and some spare equipment lying around, I decided to give Novell's Open Enterprise Server an install. I work in a Netware environment, but given recent trends, I decided to try and drop OES on a fresh SuSE Enterprise install. This isn't a comprehensive review; rather it's just some comments while I was just playing around. It might give people a better idea what OES actually is.

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 5.4 is now available for testing.

I'll try to explain my experience on updating Ubuntu 4.10 Warty to 5.04 Hoary. I've been a Debian user for some years, and updated the system at least twice (Woody -> Sarge -> Sid) with apt-get dist-upgrade. I followed exactly the Hoary release notes with Synaptic, but life isn't always a path of roses, and there are some glitches that need to be solved. Discover which ones

Gnome has been plugging away with its 2.X series from quite some time now, updating every 6 months on a predictable schedule making incremental improvements with each release. During this period they have kept their API stable and have refrained from making fundamental changes to the project. The developers have acknowledged that at some point in the somewhat near future, they will break from this series and begin work on a new series that removes some of the old cruft and changes some fundamental approaches in how people use Gnome. Here are a few of my suggestions for what would help Gnome 3 a revolutionary leap forward.

In the Linux in Government Columm, Linspire gets a review - not as technological as some others - but for its contribution to the Linux adoption curve.

After a faltering start, Microsoft is stepping up its commitment to Intel's Itanium processor.

Fedora Core 4 Test 2 is now available on the FTP first mirror and over BitTorrent, more here.