KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled, packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris platform. While KDE is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot of patches. Dot.KDE has an interview with the Kde on Solaris team leader.

Asa Dotzler, from the Mozilla foundation, has just written an interesting analysis describing why Linux is not ready for desktops yet, and suggests four main categories that must be addressed to improve this.

Linux powered roughly three times the number of smartphones as Windows Mobile, in worldwide shipments during Q1 of 2005, according to an article at LinuxDevices.com. Additionally, the data cited from Gartner research says smartphones comprise the fastest-growing portion of the "mobile terminal" market, with sales expected to double year-over-year in 2006, reaching 200 million by 2008.

Groovy took a gigantic leap this past April, with the formal release of a new parser aimed at standardizing the language as part of the JSR process. If you weren't paying attention before, now's the time to start. The new syntax is chock full of enhancements to the language designed for a short learning curve and a big payoff. Resident Groovy practitioner Andrew Glover walks through most important changes to Groovy's syntax and shows you a handy feature you won't find in classic Groovy.

Sleep is an embeddable scripting solution for Java applications. Sleep is heavily inspired by Perl with bits of Objective-C thrown in. The Sleep Java API allows the language to be extended with new constructs, operators, functions, and variable containers. Version 2 just got released.

The NetBSD project would like to thank all contributors for their generous response to the recent call for donations. In only one month, almost US $27K were donated allowing the NetBSD Foundation to purchase five new machines; three of those machines will be added to the nightly build infrastructure and two of those machines will become anonymous cvs servers. For more information, including the detailed specifications of the hardware purchased, please see Christos Zoulas' email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator at the Mozilla Foundation, said Tuesday that he hopes to attract many corporate Windows 2000 users to the Firefox browser, since they will be unable to take advantage of the improvements in IE 7.

Elive, the Debian based Enlightenment (16.7 and 17) liveCD project has released version 0.1 for download. See the package and features list for more information. A screenshot tour is also available.

Reports of the death of Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop System with Linux combination are exaggerated, says its chief software executive.

Classpath 0.17 has been released. This is mainly a bug fix release for issues found with eclipse 3.1 and free Swing applications just after our 0.16 release. But it also includes some exciting new features.

"In this article, I'll attempt to list what I believe to be the most salient points of the economics of programming languages, and describe their effects on existing languages, as well as on those who desire to write and introduce new languages."

PC-BSD 0.7.8 has been released and I also recently conducted an interview with PC-BSD Project leader Kris Moore.

In the dawn of the end of IBM's OS/2 Stardock's CEO Brad Wardell pays his respects to the venerable operating system by writing a long article about the history of the OS. Stardock was one of the major third party software houses for OS/2 back in the day and so Brad has lived OS/2 from up close.

Wireless networking frees mobile workers from wires and cables, allowing them to collect and view data whenever, wherever they choose. The popularity of wireless networking is broad and continues to grow. The Gartner Group stated in an April 2005 study that by 2015, the average urban citizen in the United States and Europe will use at least six wireless networking technologies per day. read more.